Please join us on Monday, Mar. 24 from 11:15 a.m.-noon in Kathryn Mohrman Theatre for the rescheduled Sonderman Presidential Symposium event with Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery, “Building a Multiracial Democracy.”

In the 1960s, the Civil Rights marchers in Selma created a multiracial democracy. For the first time in American history, democratic participation was not limited based on racial caste. In the half-century since, our nation has grappled with what it wants to be. Do we want to embrace our newfound status as a multiracial democracy, or do we want to return to a racial caste system as we were for most of our history? Lowery will speak on the work of building a multiracial democracy amid the rise of nativism and racial division, looking at the unique tensions of this moment and how they correspond with similar periods throughout American history. 

Wesley Lowery is one of the nation’s leading reporters on issues of race and justice. He is the executive editor of The Investigative Reporting Workshop, a journalist-in-residence at the CUNY Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, and a contributing editor at The Marshall Project. He began his career covering politics, but was sent to Ferguson, Mo. in 2014 to cover the police killing of Michael Brown for the Washington Post. In the years since, he’s chronicled the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement, writing a bestselling book and launching Fatal Force, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning real-time national database of people shot and killed by the police.

This event is sponsored by CC’s Department of Political Science, and is the final event in the 2024 Sondermann Presidential Symposium: Democracy in This Moment. Thank you to the Fred A. Sondermann Memorial Fund, Marianne Lannon Lopat Memorial Lecture Fund, and McHugh Fund for their generous support of this event. For more information, visit our webpage.  

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