Rice community to celebrate MLK Day

Rice University Office of Public Affairs / News & Media Relations EXPERT ALERT Amy McCaig 713-348-6777 amym@rice.edu

Rice community to celebrate MLK Day

HOUSTON – (Jan. 16, 2015) – On the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Day, the Rice University community will hold a candlelight vigil followed by a program titled “The Struggle for Social Justice Continues.”

The vigil and program will begin at 6:30 p.m. Jan. 18 at the Rice Memorial Chapel on the Rice campus, 6100 Main St.; a reception will follow in the Rice Memorial Center’s Grand Hall. The events are free and open to the public.

Scheduled to speak are Jenifer Bratter, associate professor of sociology and director of the Kinder Institute’s Program for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Culture; Luis Duno-Gottberg, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese; Alexander Byrd, associate professor of history; Michael Emerson, the Allyn Gladys Cline Professor of Sociology and academic director of the Kinder Institute; and Gary Nakamura, president of the Houston chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League.

Members of the Rice community, including the Black Student Association and the Association of Rice University Black Alumni, will also participate in two annual parades Jan. 19 honoring the civil rights leader – the Black Heritage Society’s 37th annual “Original” MLK Birthday Parade and the 21st annual MLK Grand Parade, both at 10 a.m.

Guests of the Jan. 18 event can use Entrance 20 from Rice Boulevard to access self-paid parking. For more information on the event or the parades, contact Jan West at 713-348-6759.

News media who plan to attend should RSVP to Amy McCaig, senior media relations specialist at Rice, at 713-348-6777 or amym@rice.edu.

For a map of Rice University’s campus, visit www.rice.edu/maps/maps.html.

-30-

Follow Rice News and Media Relations on Twitter @RiceUNews.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,920 undergraduates and 2,567 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just over 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is highly ranked for best quality of life by the Princeton Review and for best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go here.