The Africana Studies Program presents two events for Black History Month at Fresno State, including distinguished Martin Luther King, Jr. historian Dr. Clayborne Carson at 6 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 9, in Grosse Industrial Technology room 101.

Carson, the centennial professor of history at Stanford University, will present “Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Ongoing Struggle for Freedom.”

Since earning his doctorate from UCLA in 1975, Carson has dedicated his professional life to the study of King. In 1985, the late Coretta Scott King invited Carson to direct the Kings Papers Project. Under Carson’s leadership, the Kings Paper Project produced seven volumes of King’s speeches, sermons, correspondence and publications. In 2005, he expanded the work of the King Papers Project by founding Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.

Carson was featured in the 2015 documentary “Black Panther: Vanguard of the Revolution,” which premieres Feb. 16 on PBS.

The presentation is co-sponsored by the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lectureship Program as part of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Gunnar Myrdal Lecture Series.

The second event is a screening of the film “Bridging the Divide: Tom Bradley and the Politics of Race” at 6 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 18, in Engineering East room 191.

The 2015 documentary tells the story of Tom Bradley, who was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1973 and became the first African-American mayor of a major American city with a majority white population.

The film is a project of OUR L.A., a nonprofit established by the filmmakers Lyn Goldfarb and Alison Sotomayor to increase public awareness of the people and stories of Los Angeles.

Discussant for the presentation will be Caitlin Parker, a graduate student at UCLA who is writing one of the nation’s few dissertations on Bradley, tentatively titled “Mayor Bradley’s Los Angeles: Urban Governance in an Era of Austerity, 1973-1993.”

The campus screening is co-sponsored by the Jewish Studies Certificate Program.

For more information about the lecture series, contact Dr. De Anna Reese, coordinator of the Africana Studies Program, at 559.278.2832.

(Copy by Erika Denise Castañon, University Communications news assistant).

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