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Desmond-Fish Library Explores Gandhi, King and New York in Martin Luther King Day Programs
The Desmond Fish Library in Garrison is proud to present its 12th annual Martin Luther King Day observance, Bringing the Dream Home: Civil Rights and the Hudson Valley, with a potluck supper (bringing food to share is welcome) and speakers' program on Gandhi, King and New York , Sunday, January 20 at 6:30pm and a children's program on Kids & Nonviolence Monday, January 21 at 2pm.
The program explores the American lineage of Gandhian nonviolence and how it came to influence Dr. King and American life. As young men, Gandhi and King both were influenced by Thoreau and Emerson. New Yorkers who were leaders of the War Resisters League, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) were instrumental in bringing Gandhi's ideas about non-violence to American peace and civil rights movements.
"This is the 60th anniversary of Gandhi's assassination and the 40th anniversary of Dr. King's," said Stephen Kent, a trustee of the Library. "This year we wanted to commemorate their lives and their relationship, and we discovered that not only did Gandhi influence King, but American thinkers influenced Gandhi, and that New Yorkers were instrumental in building the bridge between Gandhian nonviolence and King's tactics. We were lucky enough to attract some key historians and movers of this history to our program."
The Sunday, January 20, 6:30pm event features distinguished presenters and respondents including Scott H. Bennett, Richard Deats and George Houser.
Scott Bennett teaches history at Georgian Court University, in New Jersey. His books include Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America,1915-1963.
Richard Deats, of Nyack, New York was a leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation from 1972 to 2005. He was an active member of the civil rights movement, taught active nonviolence in over a dozen countries, led Journeys of Reconciliation to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and was part of an FOR peace effort in Iraq and met with the PLO in Tunis, with Burmese liberation groups, and with indigenous movements in Ecuador. His books include his biographies Martin Luther King, Jr., Spirit-led Prophet, (with a foreword by Coretta Scott King), and Mahatma Gandhi, and Active Nonviolence: A Way of Life, A Strategy for Change, which he coedited.
George Houser, of Pomona, New York, now 92, was one of the "Union 8" - eight Union Theology Seminary students including David Dellinger, who although exempt from the draft, refused to register and in 1940 were jailed in Danbury prison. In 1942 Houser co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), together with James Farmer Jr., depicted in the film The Great Debaters. CORE was one of the key organizations of the civil rights movement, worked closely with Dr. King and helped focus the movement on non-violent tactics. It supported the first student sit-ins at Greensboro, N.C., dining counters; the Freedom Riders campaign to integrate the interstate bus system in the South, and voter registration drives in Mississippi whose leaders were assassinated. Houser also directed the American Committee on Africa, and is the author of No One Can Stop the Rain: Glimpses of Africa`s Liberation Struggle .
Monday afternoon, January 21, at 2pm, the Library presents children's program on Kids and Nonviolence: an afternoon of story telling, art and age-appropriate teachings on non-violence for children. It features Jeani Miller, facilitator for the nonviolence training group Creative Response to Conflict, and storyteller Jonathan Kruk. This program is made possible with support from the Friends of the Desmond Fish Library.
Both events are free and open to the public.
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