November 15, 2005

The 14th annual Jonathan Daniels Memorial Lecture will be held on November 17 at Episcopal Divinity Seminary (EDS), in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with guest speaker Richard Parker, a senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Daniels, a 26-year-old Episcopal seminarian, answered the call of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to help register African-American voters in Alabama, only to be shot and killed months later, on August 20, 1965, while shielding 16-year-old Ruby Sales from the shotgun fired by a sheriff's deputy.

He was declared "a martyr and witness to the Gospel" and in 1994 his name was added to the Episcopal Church calendar of saints and martyrs, to be remembered on August 14 each year.

In 1991, EDS class of 1966 established the lectureships to honor Daniels' courageous witness and to remember their friend and classmate. The lectures aim to assure that the wisdom of those who continue the struggle for justice will be heard. They also represent the longstanding commitment of EDS and its alumni to civil rights, social justice, and peace – commitments for which Daniels lived and died.

This year, in celebrating the life and witness of Daniels, EDS, Boston Theological Institute, and the Bread for the World Institute have combined this commemorative lecture with the Faith and the Millennium Development Goals lecture series.

Under the theme "Global Environmental Justice: Combating Racism to Ensure Environmental Sustainability," Parker will address the goal of ensuring environmental sustainability, while speaking about a new global racial injustice: environmental racism. From his experience as an activist, economist, scholar, and person of faith, Parker will also offer ways to ensure justice and a safe and sustainable global environment for all.

A question and answer period and a reception will immediately follow the lecture.

For information about the reception email Alcurtis Clark at aclark@eds.edu or call 617.868.3450. For information about the Jonathan Daniels lecture email mphillips@eds.edu or call 617.868.3450 ext. 514.

Note: The following titles are available from the Episcopal Book/Resource Center, 815 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10017; 800.334.7626; http://www.episcopalbookstore.org/.

To read: SILENT COVENANTS: Brown v. Board of Education and the unfulfilled hopes for Racial Reform by Derrick Bell (Oxford University Press, New York, New York, http://www.oup.com/ 2004, 230 pages; $14.95.)

When the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education was handed down in 1954, many civil rights advocates believed that the decision, which declared public school segregation unconstitutional, would become the Holy Grail of racial justice. Here, Derrick Bell shatters the shining image of this celebrated ruling, maintaining that the Court should have determined instead to rigorously enforce the "equal" component of the "separate but equal" standard. Racial policy, Bell maintains is made through silent covenants – unspoken compromises of interest that include involuntary sacrifices of rights – which ensure that polices conform to a pre-determined set of priorities. The experience with Brown, Bell urges, should teach us that meaningful progress in the quest for racial justice requires more than the assertion of harms.

In Silent Covenants, Bell condenses more than four decades of thought and action into a powerful and eye-opening book certain to stir debate over an issue long thought to be beyond dispute.

Derrick Bell is Visiting Professor of Law at New York University Law School. As an NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer, he handled and supervised hundreds of school desegregation cases during the 1960s. He is the author of several books, including Faces at the Bottom of the Well.

To read: FREE AT LAST: A History of the Civil Rights Movement and Those Who Died in the Struggle by Sara Bullard (Oxford University Press, New York, New York, http://www.oup.com/ 1994, 112 pages; $12.95.)

In Montgomery, Alabama, in 1989, a memorial was built to commemorate the achievements of the civil rights era and to honor those who died during that struggle. A few of the victims were well known – Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. – but there were many whose names you could not find in the history books: John Earl Reese, Willie Edwards, Clarence Triggs.

Along with a history of the civil rights movement, the stories of those who died are told here. Their lives serve as examples of the many personal tragedies suffered for a movement that transformed America from a society in which blacks were routinely excluded from full citizenship into one that now recognizes, if it has not entirely realized, the equal rights of all citizens.

Sara Bullard worked as a feature and investigative journalist in Fort Lauderdale, Baltimore, and Boston. She has also published articles in Educational Leadership, American Vision, The New York Times, and many other publications, and her fiction has appeared in Southern Humanities Review.

Episcopal News Service