King's Call to Young AmericansSpecial EventIn-Person
Historians have largely forgotten that children and young adults were key players in energizing the modern civil rights movement. Sit-ins, children’s marches, and the jailing of youth activists were not insignificant events in civil rights history. Nor was Martin Luther King Jr. unaware of how important children and young adults were to the movement’s progress and vision. In this master class, we will consider King’s relationship to the various scenes of youth protest, courage, and sometimes tragedy, and the remarkable way he inspired young Americans—through both his voice and his pen—to see themselves in the brilliant future his words imagined for them. What inspiration and lessons can today’s teachers draw from King’s organizing, speeches, and writing to motivate young people to recognize their part in building a free, just, and beautiful global future? Together we will look to King not simply as another profile in courage but as a guide and muse for twenty-first-century teachers seeking to inspire a new generation of dreamers and justice-loving visionaries.
This master class is open to teachers in the Early Career Fellowship and their mentors.
Maurice Wallace
Maurice Wallace is professor and associate chair of English at Rutgers-New Brunswick. He specializes in African American literature and cultural studies, nineteenth-century American literature, the history and representation of American slavery, and African American oratory. He is the author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995, which earned the William Scarborough Prize from the Modern Languages Association, as well as King’s Vibrato: Blackness, Modernism, and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. He and Shawn Michelle Smith are co-editors of Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African-American Identity. Wallace has served on the editorial boards for American Literature and Yale Journal of Criticism, and is a contributing editor to James Baldwin Review. His current research and writing agendas include a monograph on the material culture and collection habits of Frederick Douglass.