Please join the Coalition of Black Students for the culminating event of Black History Month on Friday, Feb. 24 at 5:30 p.m. in Sussman Theater. Human rights activist and attorney Kathleen Neal Cleaver will deliver a lecture for the Drake and Des Moines community on the topic of the Black Panthers and Liberation, followed by a question-and-answer session. All are welcome at this event, which is free and open to the public.

Kathleen Neal Cleaver, who currently holds an appointment as a senior lecturer and research fellow at Emory University School of Law, has spent her life participating in the human rights struggle. She started alongside her parents in the 1950s civil rights protests in Alabama. By 1966, Kathleen Neal dropped out of Barnard College in New York to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) where she served in its Campus Program based in Atlanta. She then moved to the San Francisco Bay area, and from 1967 to 1971, she was the first communications secretary of the Black Panther Party.

The annual Black on Black Banquet, sponsored by the Coalition of Black Students to celebrate its achievements and honor this year’s guest speaker, will follow the lecture and will begin at 7 p.m. in Parents Hall. This event is free but ticketed due to seating capacity. For information on banquet tickets, please contact cbs@drake.edu.

—Melissa Klimaszewski, English Department