Dominican U hosts lecture in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday



Dominican University will host a lecture, "Rivers, Waves and Dreams: Metaphors of the African American Sociohistorical Experience," on Thursday, January 20 in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday week. Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, president of the National Council for Black Studies, will present the lecture at 4:30 p.m. in Rosary Chapel, 7900 W. Division Street, River Forest.

Cha-Jua, associate professor of history and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will discuss the river, waves and dream metaphors used by Langston Hughes, Vincent Harding, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The dream was King's central metaphor for African Americans' aspirations for freedom, justice and equality. Cha-Jua will look at how the river analogy applies to African Americans' long, winding sojourn in the U.S. Cha-Jua argues that the modern Black liberation movement is best conceived as a series of dialectically related, surging waves whose advances are followed by the ebbing waters of retrenchment and regression. 

Cha-Jua is the author of America's First Black Town, Brooklyn, Illinois, 1830-1915 (2000); Sankofa: Racial Formation and Transformation, Toward a Theory of African American History (2000); and co-editor of Race Struggles (2009). He serves on the editorial boards of The Black Scholars, Journal of African American Studies, and Journal of Black Studies.