Keynote Event

Sunday, January 17, 2010
Long Center for the Performing Arts
6:00pm (Doors open at 5:30pm)

Tickets are on sale at Mitchie’s Fine Black Art and at Long Center
Click Here to Buy Tickets Online

The Austin MLK celebration includes the 17th Annual Keynote Address on January 17, 2010.  This years keynote will feature Michael Eric Dyson and the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

Dr. Michael Eric Dyson – who is an American Book Award recipient and two-time NAACP Image Award winner – is one of the nation’s most influential and renowned public intellectuals. He has been named one of the 150 most powerful African Americans by Ebony magazine. The Philadelphia Weekly contends that Dr. Dyson “is reshaping what it means to be a public intellectual by becoming the most visible black academic of his time.”

Not only has Dr. Dyson taught at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities – including Brown, Chapel Hill, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania – but his influence has carried far beyond the academy into prisons and bookstores, political conventions and union halls, and church sanctuaries and lecture stages across the world.

Dr. Dyson has appeared on nearly every major media outlet, including The Today Show, Nightline, O’Reilly Factor, The Tavis Smiley Show and Real Time with Bill Maher – and he has cemented his star appeal on such shows as Rap City, Def Poetry Jam and The Colbert Report. He is also a contributing editor of Time magazine.

His powerful work has won him legions of admirers and has made him what the Washington Post terms a “superstar professor.” His fearless and fiery oratory led the Chronicle of Higher Education to declare that with his rhetorical gifts he “can rock classroom and chapel alike.” Dr. Dyson’s eloquent writing inspired Vanity Fair magazine to describe him as “one of the most graceful and lucid intellectuals writing on race and politics today.”

Dr. Dyson is presently University Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. His legendary rise – from welfare father to Princeton Ph.D., from church pastor to college professor, from a factory worker who didn’t start college until he was 21 to a figure who has become what writer Naomi Wolf terms “the ideal public intellectual of our time” – may help explain why author Nathan McCall simply calls him “a street fighter in suit and tie.”