Peabody Museum Will Host Two Days Of MLK Events

NEW HAVEN — The Yale Peabody Museum will host its annual two-day MLK celebration on Sunday, January 15, from noon to 4 pm, and Monday, January 16, from 10 am to 5 pm.

“Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s Legacy of Environmental and Social Justice 2006” will feature live music and dance performances, open mic poetry, a nationally recognized invitational poetry slam, the Hip-Hop Café and over 30 educational activities for families. Admission into the museum will be free both days.

This year’s poetry slam will feature winners from the past nine years, who will compete for a $1,000 prize.

One of the eight storytelling sessions features Eugene Scott with The Story of Rosa Parks. On Sunday actors will represent Connecticut’s historic black governors.

Singer, teacher and civil rights leader Bernice Johnson Reagon will give the Fifth Annual Arnold J. Alderman Memorial Lecture on Sunday, January 15, at 5 pm. Her lecture is entitled “And, There Are Those of Us Who Straddle… Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement.”

The lecture will be presented at Yale’s Sprague Memorial Hall at 470 College Street. Admission is free.

For more than 40 years Ms Reagon has been a major cultural voice for freedom and justice, as a singer with the ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, and as teacher and outspoken critic of racism and organized inequities of all kinds.

She is professor emeritus of history at American University and curator emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Among her honors was the Heinz Award for the Arts and Humanities in 2003.

For full program information contact the Peabody Museum, which is at 170 Whitney Avenue, at 203-432-5050.