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December 22, 2006
ANDOVER, Mass. — Phillips Academy will mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day with a series of special events on Monday, January 15, 2007, including a student forum that will be conducted jointly with Movement City, an after-school arts program run through Lawrence Community Works, a nonprofit community development corporation. The forum will address ways in which King’s work is still applicable today.
In addition to the joint forum, Phillips Academy is planning a series of events to mark the holiday:
• In an all-campus assembly, award-winning author Chris Abani will address how art can champion improved human rights. Abani’s novel Graceland offers a portrait of postcolonial Nigeria via the eyes of a teenage Elvis impersonator. When only 18, Abani was imprisoned in Nigeria and labeled a threat to that country’s national security. More arrests and a death sentence followed; Abani eventually was released and later relocated—to the United Kingdom, then California. A creative writing instructor at the University of California–Riverside, his latest work is Becoming Abigail, a novella about a Nigerian girl forced to work as a London prostitute by her family.
• Kenji Yoshino, a law professor at Yale, will address students and adult members of the PA community in separate sessions. A prolific author, in 2006 he published Covering: The Hidden Assault on our Civil Rights. The New Yorker said of his work: “Exploring the history of civil-rights litigation in the United States, Yoshino concludes that courts have too often focused on individuals’ capacity to assimilate, rather than on the legitimacy of the demand that they do so.”
• All PA lowers (sophomores) and other students will attend a performance by Michael Fowlin titled “You Don’t Know Me Until You Know Me.” In this one-person show, Fowlin plays nine characters, both male and female, sharing their stories and addressing the issues of race, discrimination, violence prevention, personal identity, suicide, gender equity, homophobia, and the emotional pain felt by special education children. Fowlin has provided peer mediation, diversity trainings, gender equity workshops, and violence prevention seminars throughout the United States and beyond.
• On Sunday, January 14, and continuing the following afternoon, students and faculty will take part in a workshop devoted to watching and discussing film director Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Participants in the workshop will spend two hours on Sunday afternoon or evening watching the first half of Lee’s documentary and will reconvene Monday afternoon to watch the final two hours of the film and to participate in an hour-long discussion. When the Levees Broke focuses on a variety of issues that were exposed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, particularly issues of race and class.
• The Martin Luther King Jr. Day Kids’ Fair will be held from noon to 3 p.m. Monday, January 15, in the Case Memorial Cage, part of the Phillips Academy sports complex. Invitations were extended to students from local schools, ages 4 to 12, to participate in five distinct PA student-led stations. Games, art projects, and stories honoring the themes of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. are the main focus of the event.
• Student Alexander B. Heffner, political director of WPAA, the student-run radio station, will air a special MLK Jr. Commemorative program on Saturday, Jan. 20 from 7:00 to 11:00 PM EST. The broadcast will be open to the PA alumni, parent, and student community via the school's intranet and will feature interviews with prominent African Americans in public life. Among the guests who will call into the program are Democratic Congressman John Lewis (GA-05), Fmr. Republican Congressman J.C. Watts (OK-04), Juan Williams of NPR, William Raspberry of the Washington Post, and Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune. The guests will discuss Dr. King's historical and modern significance and their own views on contemporary civil rights issues in the context of his legacy. In addition, Heffner will broadcast several of Dr. King's landmark speeches and writings, including his Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963), March on Washington ("I Have a Dream") Address for Jobs and Freedom (1963), Declaration Against the Vietnam War (1964), and a 1957 Interview entitled "The New Negro," conducted by Richard D. Heffner, his grandfather and the long-time host of the weekly public television series "The Open Mind."
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