Facing History and Ourselves Hosts 24th Annual Chicago Benefit Dinner
with former Freedom Leaders Rev. Dr. Bernard Lafayette, Jr. and Gerald Stern
Thursday, April 30, 2015
The Chicago office of international educational nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves will welcome more than 750 of Chicago’s leading civic and corporate leaders, teachers and students to its 24th Annual Chicago Benefit Dinner in the Grand Ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Chicago (151 E. Wacker Drive) on this evening April 30, 2015. This year’s event will feature keynote speakers Rev. Dr. Bernard Lafayette, Jr. and Gerald Stern, participants in the 1961 Freedom Riders movement.
This year’s event highlights Facing History and Ourselves’ work and honors the commitment of its supporters. Each year, Facing History teachers in the Chicago metropolitan area reach over 231,500 middle and high school students at 700 public, religious, and independent schools.
This year’s Benefit Dinner will honor the Freedom Riders. In 1961, this group of extraordinary young civil rights activists, at their peril, rode interstate buses to challenge the non-enforcement of desegregation rulings in the southern United States. Rev. Dr. Bernard Lafayette, Jr. and Gerald Stern, participants in this movement, will share their stories along with Facing History teachers and students. This year our ballroom will become a classroom where we explore how this history resonates today.
The business attire event will begin at 5:30 p.m. with a cocktail reception followed by dinner and program at 6:30 p.m. Co-Chairs for the event are Stephanie Neely and Shawn Lytle. Tickets are $500 per person and tables start at $5,000. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit facing history.org or call 312-345-3232.
Rev. Dr. Bernard Lafayette, Jr., an ordained minister, is a longtime civil rights activist, organizer, and an authority on nonviolent social change. He co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960, and was a core leader of the civil rights movement in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1960 and in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. He directed the Selma Voter Registration Project in 1962, and was appointed by Martin Luther King, Jr. to be national program administrator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and national coordinator of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. He is a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence Emeritus at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. He is also the National Chairman of the Board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Gerald Stern was a trial attorney with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, trying voting discrimination cases in the South from 1961 to 1964. After leaving the Department of Justice, Jerry worked at Arnold & Porter before becoming a founding partner of the Washington, D.C. law firm of Rogovin, Stern & Huge from 1976 to 1981. In addition to being an author and former Facing History Board member, Jerry is currently a legal consultant in Washington, D.C.
Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational and professional development organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and anti-Semitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. By studying the historical development of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide and mass violence, students make the essential connection between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives. More information is available at facinghistory.org.
About Post Author
