For several decades Wesleyan has celebrated the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The celebration has taken various forms including prominent keynote speakers such as Johnetta Cole and Sonia Sanchez to a campus based program where members of the faculty, staff and students read portions of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Keynote Speaker: Ruby Sales

At the start of every Spring semester we come together as a community to honor the civil rights legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This year’s MLK Commemoration will be held on Friday, February 12th from 12:15 pm -1:15pm on Zoom.  This year our keynote speaker will be Civil Rights activist, organizer, author, and educator, Ruby Sales. 

Ruby Nell Sales looks at her work as a calling rather than a career. She answered the call to social justice as a teenager at Tuskegee Institute where she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and worked on voter registration in Lowndes County, Alabama.  Sales received a B.A. degree from Manhattanville College and attended graduate school at Princeton University.  Sales received a Masters of Divinity degree from the Episcopal Divinity School where she was an Absalom Jones Scholar. While there, she developed a reputation as a preacher and has preached at churches and cathedrals around the nation.  After divinity school, she founded and still directs a national nonprofit organization, the SpiritHouse Project. 

This is event is sponsored by The Resource Center, Office for Equity and Inclusion, Department of African-American Studies and the Center for African-American Studies, Fries Center for Global Studies, Shapiro Writing Center, and the Wesleyan Library. If you have any questions about the event, please don’t hesitate to contact Demetrius Colvin at dcolvin@wesleyan.edu.

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