The Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University is pleased to announce that Charlie Cobb, civil rights activist and journalist, will keynote the 55th annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Birthday Convocation. Free and open to the public, MLK Convocation will be held in M.W. Stringer Grand Lodge auditorium at 1072 John R. Lynch Street at 9:00 a.m., Friday, January 13, 2023.
A former field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Cobb helped to organize Freedom Summer with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in 1964. He had the idea to create Freedom Schools, teaching reading, writing, and mathematics along with Black history and culture to anyone who was interested.
The Margaret Walker Center will also host its 28th annual For My People Awards luncheon immediately following MLK Convocation at noon in the JSU Student Center Ballroom on Friday, January 13. This year’s ceremony will honor Cobb and civil rights activist Euvester Simpson, as well as scholar Tiyi Morris and archivist Angela Stewart for their contributions to African American history and culture.
Euvester Simpson served as a Field Secretary for SNCC during the civil rights movement, conducting voter registration and voter education workshops throughout Mississippi. On June 9, 1963, she, along with Annelle Ponder, Fannie Lou Hamer, June Johnson, and several others, were arrested in Winona, Mississippi, for being in a “white only” area of the bus terminal. Simpson shared a jail cell with Hamer, and members of the group were beaten by their jailers.
Tiyi Morris, daughter of Euvester Simpson, is Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University at Newark and director of the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project. She is a civil rights historian who studies Black women’s social and political activism and is the author of Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi (2015).
Angela Stewart serves as the archivist for the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University and is the daughter of Dorothy Stewart, a 2012 For My People Award honoree. She is the founder/facilitator for SANKOFA Reading Group and hosts a monthly podcast, History Matters, for the Women for Progress Radio Network.