- Posted in All University
- Category: Campus News
LINCOLN UNIVERSITY, PA ~ Jesse Epps, an advisor to slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., will speak at Lincoln University on Thursday, February 21 at 4 p.m. in the Mary Dod Brown Memorial Chapel, a program in celebration of Black History Month.
The English and Mass Communications Department in the School of Humanities and Graduate Studies is sponsoring Mr. Epps’s appearance at the university.
Epps has been an erstwhile participant in the struggle for civil rights. He is credited with inviting Dr. King to Memphis, Tenn. to help organize the striking sanitation workers, but he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
Epps received training in labor relations at Syracuse, Rutgers and Cornell universities and has spent the last 40 years fighting for and defending the rights and conditions of all working men and women.
He began his professional labor experience working for the International Union of Electrical Workers at Local 320 in Syracuse, N.Y., where he served as chief steward and was an executive board member of the education and civil rights committees.
Born in Dublin, Miss., a farming community during the height of the depression and segregation, Epps served as the assistant to the International President of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees from 1960-1972. In that capacity he assisted in the oversight and direction of an international field staff of officers and volunteers and directed field operations in several states, including Georgia, Maryland, Ohio, Tennessee, Florida and Louisiana. He also directed a statewide operation in New York.
Epps advised President Lyndon B. Johnson on matters relating to the participation of youth, students and minorities in the Democratic Party and in government.
The event is free and open to the public. For more information, call 484-365-8094.
Founded in 1854, Lincoln University is a premier, historically Black University that combines the best elements of a liberal arts and sciences-based undergraduate core curriculum and selected graduate programs to meet the needs of those living in a highly technological and global society. The University is nationally recognized as a major producer of African Americans with undergraduate degrees in the physical sciences (biology, chemistry and physics); computer and informational sciences; biological and life sciences. Lincoln has an enrollment of 2,423 undergraduate and graduate students.