The University of Lynchburg will celebrate the life and leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at 6 p.m. Monday, January 20, in Snidow Chapel, with a dramatic performance and reflections on the civil rights leader’s life.
The performance imagines a “meeting of the minds” between King and Malcolm X — two men with very different ideas about nonviolence and how the Civil Rights Movement should move forward. It’s part of a play, “In Remembrance of MLK: From Beyond Vietnam to the Dream,” written by Teresa Harris, an information officer in Lynchburg’s safety and security office.
Desmond Mosby ’09, the University’s student employment coordinator, will play Malcolm X, while James Stewart, the founder of the UP Foundation in Lynchburg, will portray King on stage.
The full play reflects on the last year of King’s life, after he gave his controversial “Beyond Vietnam” speech. Mosby and Stewart will perform the play’s “dream sequence,” which imagines what a conversation between King and Malcolm X might have been like, although in reality they only met briefly before both were assassinated in the 1960s.
The service will also include students Destaunia Perry ’21 and Darian Geddis ’20 reading the words of King with a call to action. Dr. Robert Canida, the University’s diversity and inclusion officer, will give “A Pledge to Peace and Action.”
