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On January 18, 2016, Martin Luther King  Jr. Day, ɫ����Ƶ students represented the University and its Office of Intercultural Student Engagement at the Maine NAACP’s annual MLK Holiday  Celebration Dinner at the Holiday Inn by the Bay in Portland.

Several of Maine’s elected leaders attended and U.S. Senator King met with ɫ����Ƶ students during the dinner.

The University has planned a series of events as part of its 29th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration, which honors King’s visit to St. Francis College, the precursor to ɫ����Ƶ’s Biddeford Campus, in May of 1964.

This year’s events series, titled “Living With Our Conscience,” was named after a phrase used by King in 1965 speech in Montgomery, Alabama: “We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.” The events address the university’s ongoing commitment to social justice.

Two keynote events, one on each of the two Maine campuses, will be featured as part of the celebration. Charlene Carruthers, M.S.W., national director of the Black Youth Project 100, an activist member-led organization of black 18-35 year-olds dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all black people, will deliver a talk, “#SayHerName: Stories and Strategies to end Mass Criminalization,” on the Biddeford Campus on January 27 at 12 p.m. in the Campus Center Multipurpose Rooms.

Josepha Campinha-Bacote, Ph.D., M.A.R., PMHCNS-BC, CTN-A, FAAN, president of Transcultural C.A.R.E. Associates, will address the Portland Campus on February 3 at 12 p.m. in the WCHP Lecture Hall with a discussion of “Cultural Competence in Healthcare Delivery: A Culturally-Conscious Model of Patient Care.”

Other events that will be held as part of the Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration include a “Review of Civil Rights Pilgrimage Trips” by Jennifer DeBurro, assistant dean of students for residence life, and Maria Goodwin, coordinator of the first-year experience, on January 26 in the St. Francis Room on the Biddeford Campus as well as a screening  of the film Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, sponsored by the UNitEd and Alliance student organizations, to be held later than evening at 6 p.m. in the same location.

In addition, ɫ����Ƶ’s  Biddeford Campus Center will display art by students enrolled in the Advanced Diversity Leadership Certificate program who were inspired by the Created Equal documentary series, which was produced by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

All events are free and open to the public.

Learn more about the upcoming events