Stetson University presents author and historian Dr. Peniel Joseph to speak on “Stokely Carmichael and American Democracy in the 1960s” as part of the university’s civil rights and social justice lecture series, at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 23.

The lecture will be held in the Rinker Auditorium of the Lynn Business Center, 345 N. Woodland Blvd., DeLand, and is free and open to the public.

Joseph, a professor of history at Tufts University, is currently working on a biography of Black Power icon Stokely Carmichael and his involvement in the American Civil Rights Movement, and that will be the focus of Joseph’s lecture at Stetson.

Carmichael, who later changed his name to Kwame Ture, was a well-known black activist in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. He was involved in such organizations as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and participated in the Freedom Rides. He was one of the authors of the manifesto “Black Power.” Carmichael spoke at Stetson in 1997 and died the following year.

Professor Joseph is the author of the award-winning Waiting ‘til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America and Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, as well as editor of The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era and Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level.

Joseph is the founder of the “Black Power Studies” subfield whose reverberations have widely impacted interdisciplinary scholarship within the academy and popular conceptions of civil rights and Black Power outside of it. He is a frequent national commentator on issues of race, democracy, and civil rights who has appeared on CNN, MSNC, and NPR. During the 2008 presidential election he provided historical analysis for the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

For more information, contact the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at (386) 822-7515.