To commemorate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, on Tuesday, January 21, LSU Libraries is hosting two events at the Hill Memorial Library Lecture Hall to launch the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant funded film-based program, Created Equal: America’s Civil Rights Struggle.  Maxine Crump, CEO and President of Dialogue on Race Louisiana, will moderate the first event, which is a public forum that includes a showing of film clips and a discussion about the LPB documentary, Signpost to Freedom: The 1953 Baton Rouge Bus Boycott.  This event, held from 12:00-1:15, is designed to encourage community members and students to explore events and concepts from the film, relate those issues to today’s climate of racial and cultural divides, and to discuss visions for future community relationships.  The second event, held at 6:30 pm, will be a full screening of the film.

On site at this event, visitors can also see the exhibit, The Relentless Pursuit of “Equal”: Integrating LSU, hosted by LSU Libraries Special Collections to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.  The exhibit features archival materials and oral histories that trace the evolution of LSU from an institution embracing an official policy of racial segregation to one actively promoting the concept of “cultural inclusion.”

For more information about the exhibition, please visit https://exhibitions.blogs.lib.lsu.edu.  For more information about the schedules for the remaining four documentaries to be featured the Created Equal film-based program, please visit http://www.lib.lsu.edu/sp/subjects/createdequal.