In a rare event that will bear witness to the nation's long struggle for racial equality in society and in the classroom, Teachers College, Columbia University will honor several important leaders who played crucial roles in the American civil rights movement at its 2002 Master's Convocation. Coretta Scott King, the Brown family, Congressman John Lewis, and David Levering Lewis will all speak at the ceremony and will each receive the Teachers College Medal for Distinguished Service to Education (biographies attached).
The Convocation will recognize efforts to bring equity to American education, from Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 to desegregation to today's struggle to close the achievement gap. Medal winners are expected to address the important role the civil rights movement has played in the history of American education, and how ongoing efforts are needed on behalf of the continued challenges to equality in the nation's classrooms.
The 2002 Masters Convocation ceremony will be held at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, May 21, 2002, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, located at Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street in New York City. Honored guests will also participate in the annual medalists dinner that will take place on the evening prior to the ceremony at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, May 20, 2002, at International House, 500 Riverside Drive, New York. Media attendance at both events is invited, and RSVPs are required.
A total of 1,460 master's students and 170 doctoral students will receive their degrees during the 2002 convocation. Teachers College graduates represent 32 states and the District of Columbia as well as 51 nations. Of the graduates from the United States, 11 percent are African American, 5.2 percent are Asian American, and 8.1 percent are Hispanic American.
Teachers College is the largest graduate school of education in the nation and has been consistently ranked by the editors of U.S. News and World Report as one of the best in its class. Teachers College is affiliated with Columbia University, but is legally and financially independent. For more information about Teachers College, please visit www.tc.edu.
Coretta Scott King
Coretta Scott King first entered the public eye in 1955 as the wife of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and as a leading participant in the American civil rights movement. King has devoted her life to service affecting social change toward the highest values of human dignity. An influential leader at home and abroad, Mrs. King travels extensively to raise awareness of issues including racial and economic justice, educational opportunities, women's and children's rights, gay and lesbian dignity, religious freedom, the needs of the poor and homeless, full employment, health care, nuclear disarmament, and ecological sanity. She frequently serves as a consultant to world leaders including Corazon Aquino, Kenneth Kaunda, and Nelson Mandela.
In 1969, King began mobilizing support for the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change. As founding president of the Center, she guided construction of its permanent home and made plans to include an exhibition hall, a restoration of King's childhood home, an Institute for Afro-American studies, and a museum and library that houses King's papers.
By the 1980s, King had become one of the most visible and influential African-American leaders. In 1983, she led the effort that brought more than 500,000 demonstrators to Washington, D.C. to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the 1963 march on Washington where her husband delivered the famous "I Have a Dream" speech. She participated in the successful effort to establish a national holiday in honor of her husband, which began celebrating Dr. King in 1986. Mrs. King's role as a speaker for freedom and justice earned her the honor of being the first woman to speak at Harvard University's Class Day exercises and at London's St. Paul's Cathedral.
The Brown Family
For the first time, Teachers College will present the Teachers College Medal for Distinguished Service to Education to an entire family. That family, the Browns, was represented in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Oliver Brown et. al. v. The Board of Education of Topeka. The case, which was brought by the Browns and 12 other families recruited by the NAACP to challenge public school segregation in Kansas, focused media attention on Linda Brown Thompson. As a child, Thompson had to walk seven blocks to reach the bus to take her to an all-black elementary school, even though there was a white elementary school minutes from her home. Thompson's situation, shared by many other black students, angered black parents and led Oliver Brown to walk his daughter to the nearby all-white school to try, without success, to enroll her. After four years, the Supreme Court unanimously declared segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, striking down the notion that public schools could be separate as long as they were equal.
Realizing years later that the anniversaries of the Supreme Court decision passed unnoticed and history classes only offered slight mention of the case, the Brown family took up the challenge to commemorate and interpret this history for school children and for the general public. The Brown Foundation for Educational Equality, Excellence and Research was formed to further educational equity and multicultural understanding in order to improve the quality of life for individuals and strengthen an overall sense of community. The Foundation provides scholarships to minority students entering teacher education, sponsors programs with emphasis on racial/ethnic diversity, and supports historical research and other educational activities in keeping with its mission. Congressman John Lewis
John Lewis was elected to the United States Congress in November 1986 and represents Georgia's Fifth Congressional District, which is comprised of the entire city of Atlanta as well as parts of Fulton, DeKalb, and Clayton counties. He is currently serving his eighth term in office. Lewis has dedicated his life to protecting human rights and has been described as "one of the most courageous persons the civil rights movement ever produced." His sense of ethics and morality has won him the admiration of many of his colleagues in Congress.
Lewis grew up in Pike County, Alabama, the son of sharecroppers, and attended segregated public schools. He developed a strong commitment to the civil rights movement at an early age and as a student organized sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1961, Lewis volunteered to participate in the Freedom Rides, organized to challenge segregation at interstate bus terminals across the South. Lewis was severely beaten by mobs for participating in the Rides.
By 1963, he was recognized as one of the "Big Six" leaders of the civil rights movement. From 1963 to 1966, Lewis was the Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a group that was largely responsible for sit-ins and other student activities in the struggle for civil rights. Despite more than 40 arrests, physical attacks, and serious injuries, Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the philosophy of nonviolence.David Levering Lewis
David Levering Lewis, the Martin Luther King Jr. University Professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, set out in the late 1970s to write a one-volume biography of the black intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois. Fifteen years later, the project had grown into two large volumes. The first volume, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, covered Du Bois' life from his birth to his role in founding the NAACP in 1910. Lewis received a number of accolades and honors for his work, including the Bancroft, Parkman, and Pulitzer prizes, and a $375,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." The second volume, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, traces the second half of Du Bois' life as an activist, historian, scholar, sociologist, co-founder of the NAACP, and a leading proponent of the civil rights movement. The book was a 2000 National Book Award Finalist.
Lewis' research involved more than 200 interviews and extensive travel across the United States, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Mexico. Lewis also conducted an exhaustive analysis of Du Bois' archives and memoirs. Lewis first encountered Du Bois in 1948 at the age of 12, visiting Wilberforce University in Ohio where Lewis' father was dean of theology. Lewis graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Fisk University and earned a master's degree from Columbia University and a doctorate degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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