Julian Bond, board chair of the NAACP, will join leaders and student activists from the civil-rights movement in South Carolina for a conference Oct. 12-13 to commemorate the 35th anniversary of USC's African American Studies Program.

Titled "Telling Our Story," the conference, will include four panel discussions and a lunch where Bond will be the keynote speaker.

All events are free and open to the public.

The "Unsung Heroes and Heroine's Awards Lunch," which will be held from 12:30 to 2 p.m. Oct. 13 in the Russell House Ballroom, also is free, but responses are required. To attend, call Carolyn Sutton at 7-7248 or e-mail her at csutton@gwm.sc.edu by Oct. 6.

Events will begin Oct. 12 with a panel discussion, "South Carolina Civil Rights Movement: Local People Telling Their Stories," from 2 to 5 p.m. in the Russell House Theater. Participants will include Victoria Delee, an activist from Dorchester County and the state's first black female to run for Congress; William Saunders, an activist from John's Island and founder of the Committee on Better Racial Assurance; Mary Moultrie, leader of the Charleston Hospital workers' strike in 1969; Gloria Blackwell, a teacher and plaintiff in the lawsuit that integrated the Orangeburg Hospital; and Millicent Brown, the plaintiff in Brown v. Charleston School District 20, the first case to successfully desegregate a public school in South Carolina.

A second panel discussion titled "Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Teaching the 1960s Freedom Struggle" will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. Oct. 12 in Belk Auditorium in the Moore School of Business. Participants will include the Rev. C.T. Vivian, an aide to the late Martin Luther King Jr. and a rider on the first "Freedom Bus" into Jackson, Miss.; Judy Richardson, a documentary producer of the films Eyes on the Prize and Malcolm X: Make it Plain; Cecil Williams, a documentary photographer of the civil rights movement in South Carolina; and Charles Cobb, author of Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights.

On Oct. 13, the first panel discussion, "The Southern Student Movement: 'Bigger than a Hamburger,'" will be held from 10 a.m. to noon in the Russell House Theater. Participants will include Chuck McDew, a founder and chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Fred Moore, an attorney and 1956 student activist at S.C. State University; and Dorris "De De" Wright, president of the NAACP youth chapter and student protest leader in Greenville. Bond also will participate, discussing the Atlanta Student Movement and Benjamin E. Mays' influence on the Southern student movement. Bond, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, was public relations director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was elected to both houses of the Georgia Legislature.

The 35th-anniversary conference will conclude with a panel discussion from 2:15 to 5 p.m., also in the Russell House Theater. Titled "Organizing the Community: Where Do We Go from Here?" the panel will feature key figures who will address the topics of identity, history, and culture. They include Constance Curry, writer, activist, lawyer, and a fellow at the Institute for Women's Studies at Emory University; and Richardson and McDew, panelists from earlier sessions. Also featured will be youth inspired by the stories of the civil rights movement, including Lauren Champaign, a USC senior from John's Island, and newly elected Rep. Bakari Sellers, son of Cleveland Sellers, civil rights activist and director of USC's African American Studies Program.

All participants of the 35th-anniversary celebration conference will be videotaped, and the interviews will become part of the Grace McFadden Oral History Project.

The African American Studies Program, under the leadership of Sellers, its sixth director, is among the University's strongest interdisciplinary programs. This year, more than 34 students are majoring in African-American studies, and another 312 students will take courses on the history, culture, and contemporary situation of African Americans in South Carolina, the South, the United States, and the African Diaspora.

For more information on the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina, go to www.cas.sc.edu/afra/index.html.

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