2021 Annual MLK Birthday Celebration: The Radical King and the Quest to Change America 1.15.21

Rothko Chapel

Today, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is celebrated for his 'dream' of a just America, but by the end of his career King was calling for a "radical reconstruction" of the United States. What compelled the transformation of King's ideas and what do they tell us about our society today? For the 2021 Annual MLK Birthday Celebration, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor engaged these questions in hopes of unlocking the ideas and strategies necessary to enact effective and lasting change in the United States. A Q&A session followed the lecture, moderated by Brandon Mack, community activist and lead organizer for Black Lives Matter: Houston. The Chapel started this important annual gathering in 1979 to connect the contemporary implications of Dr. King’s legacy to the ongoing struggle for civil and human rights, captured through artist Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk. This sculpture, located on the plaza adjacent to the Chapel, is dedicated to Dr. King. About the Presenter Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African-American Studies at Princeton University. She is author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by the University of North Carolina Press, longlisted for a National Book Award for nonfiction and a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer in History. Taylor’s book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction in 2018. Taylor is a columnist for The New Yorker. About the Moderator Brandon Mack is a community activist and sociologist dedicated to issues related to the intersections of race, gender, and sexual orientation. He is a lead organizer with Black Lives Matter: Houston, Co-Chapter Director of New Leaders Council - Houston, Screening Committee and Education and Advocacy Chair of the Houston GLBT Political Caucus, and Research Coordinator for the Mayor’s LGBTQ+ Advisory Board. Mack is currently a Ph.D. student in the Higher Education Leadership & Policy Studies at University of Houston.