After postponement due to extremely cold weather January 30, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Convocation and Community Celebration, featuring Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley as guest speaker, has been rescheduled for Tuesday, February 26, at the Bohm Theatre, 201 S. Superior St. The event will begin at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

Across 19 years at the Free Press, Riley’s columns have served as a leading voice for children, education, competent government and race. She has received numerous awards, including the 2017 Eugene C. Pulliam Editorial Fellowship from the Society of Professional Journalists and the 2017 Ida B. Wells Award from the National Association of Black Journalists for her efforts to make newsrooms and news coverage more accurately reflect the diversity of the communities they serve.

As well, her columns on the text message scandal that led to the imprisonment of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick were part of the Free Press’ 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning entry for local news.

Riley served as editor and contributing writer of The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery (Wayne State University Press, 2018) and is a co-founder of Letters to Black Girls, a project that grew from a single presentation to a national mission to pass words of encouragement from black women to girls.

MLK Day of Dialogue and Service

On Monday, January 21, Dr. Teleah Phillips, ’04, an osteopathic doctor at Oaklawn Hospital, was the keynote speaker during the College’s fourth annual Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Dialogue and Service. Dr. Phillips spoke in the Washington Gardner School auditorium (watch her address on the College’s YouTube channel); later, following smaller breakout conversations, participants engaged in a service project at the Kellogg Center benefiting S.A.F.E. Place in Battle Creek.