Wilmore To Give Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lecture
March 23, 2000
University Park, Pa. – Gayraud Wilmore, an internationally renowned scholar of African American religion and the history of the African American church, will give the 16th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lecture at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 4, in the All-Faith Chapel in Eisenhower Chapel. The lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Religious Affairs and the Department of African and African American Studies.
Until 1990, when he retired, Wilmore was a professor of church history at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. He has long served the African American church and community and is an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church USA. His career has emphasized justice, peace making and reconciliation between racial and ethnic groups in the United States and abroad.
From 1963 to 1972, Wilmore led the national racial justice program of the Presbyterian Church and mobilized its response to racism in Hattiesburg, Miss., and in major cities across the nation during the "northern city rebellions" of 1964-1968.
In 1988 he was the first recipient of the Sower Award of the New York Theological Seminary. In 1995 he received the Edler G. Hawkins Award for meritorious service to the church from the National Black Presbyterian Caucus.
His best-known book, "Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans," has had 12 printings and was published in its third edition in 1998.
Wilmore was also one of the founders of the National Committee of Black Churchmen (NCBC), the Pan-African Skills Project, and the Black Theology Project of "Theology in the Americas."
**klt**
Contact: Karen Trimbath, Department of Public Information, at (814) 865-7517 or at
