Presented Live from the Muhammad Ali Center on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
LOUISVILLE, KY (January 15, 2021) — Teaching Black History and Culture, an online workshop for Educators hosted by the Thomas D. Clark Foundation, will be presented live from the Muhammad Ali Center on Monday, January 18, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. This professional development day for Kentucky educators will occur from 9am – 3:30pm, via Zoom, combining webinar, video, and livestreaming. The workshop is free.
The workshop is a significant step in trying to educate children across the state about black history in a truthful and honest way. Though integral to Kentucky’s story and America’s, Black history and culture aren’t widely taught in our state’s public schools.
“It is more than appropriate that the Teaching Black History and Culture workshop is being held on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday,” said Virginia Fox, President of the Thomas D. Clark Foundation,” and that it will be broadcast live from the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville and the Southgate School in Northern Kentucky, a historically black school in Newport that’s now a museum. This is an effort that we feel Dr. King, Muhammad Ali and Dr. Thomas D. Clark, founder of the Thomas D. Clark Foundation, would aggressively embrace. And it’s long overdue.”
Donald Lassere, President and CEO of the Muhammad Ali Center said, “The Ali Center strongly agrees with the goal of getting black history and culture into the pedagogy of schools in Kentucky. We are honored to be a part of this initiative by presenting inside our new temporary exhibit, Truth Be Told: The Policies that Impacted Black Lives, which is a setting greatly symbolic of the struggles that both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Muhammad Ali experienced during the Civil Rights Movement. The Ali Center is also one of the newest stops on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail.”
The workshop uses years of scholarship represented by the products and research of the University Press of Kentucky consortium. It combines those works with talented Kentucky Black performing artists and writers and curated examples from Kentucky history museum collections. The Teaching Black History and Culture workshop is a major step in providing Kentucky’s dedicated educators the tools and skills to make American and Kentucky history inclusive and relevant to all Kentucky students.
The workshop is open to all Kentucky educators, including P-12 teachers, principals, and other administrators; college/university faculty and students with an interest in teaching this topic; and community leaders and education advocates.
For more information, visit http://historyofrace.com/
To register for the workshop, visit https://nku.eventsair.com/shcce/teaching/Site/Register
** Note to Media: If you are interested in interviewing panelists Donald Lassere (Muhammad Ali Center) or Bennie Ivory (Thomas D. Clark Foundation Board Member) on-site, January 18 between 10:30am and 11:30am, please contact Jeanie Kahnke at jkahnke@alicenter.org.
About the Thomas D. Clark Foundation
The Thomas D. Clark Foundation, Inc. is a private nonprofit foundation established in 1994 for the sole purpose of providing financial support for The University Press of Kentucky. It is named in honor of Thomas Clark, Kentucky’s historian laureate and the founder of The University Press of Kentucky. The Foundation’s mission is to provide financial support for the University Press’s publication of books about Kentucky and its region. To this end, the Foundation is currently working to establish an endowment of $3 million. All donations will be permanently invested in an endowment fund, the earnings from which will provide a reliable source of income for the overall publishing program of the University Press, but especially for those books about Kentucky that, because of their extraordinary expense, will require funding beyond the scope of the Press’s regular operating budget. In a time of diminishing public funds, income from such an endowment will help ensure that the University Press can continue publishing books of value to the Commonwealth.
About the Muhammad Ali Center
The Muhammad Ali Center, a 501(c)3 corporation, was cofounded by Muhammad Ali and his wife Lonnie in their hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. The international cultural center promotes the Six Core Principles of Muhammad Ali (Confidence, Conviction, Dedication, Giving, Respect, and Spirituality) in ways that inspire personal and global greatness, and provides programming and events around the focus areas of education, gender equity, and global citizenship. The Ali Center is formally associated with the United Nations Department of Global Communications, and in 2020, became one of the newest stops on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. The Center’s headquarters also contains an award-winning museum experience. For more information, please visit www.alicenter.org.
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Contact: Jeanie Kahnke Muhammad Ali Center
(502) 640-6077
(502) 992-5301