As part of ETSU’s celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Mary V. Jordan Multicultural Center will be sponsoring an online event featuring the 1960’s civil rights movement icon Bettie Mae Fikes.
Fikes continues to perform as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers and worked famously alongside other activists such as King himself and John Lewis, honoring Lewis’s legacy while singing at his funeral in July 2020.
She is known as “The Queen of the Blues”, “The Voice of Selma” and as a trans-generational representation of both the past and present movements for justice. Additionally, she has graced the stage at places like the Library of Congress and Carnegie Hall.
This event was preceded by another gathering on campus earlier this month honoring Dr. King including ETSU President Brian Noland, as well as Calvin Claggett, director for external operations and special assistant to vice president of equity and inclusion for ETSU Athletics, and Keith Johnson, vice president for equity and inclusion.
Laura Terry, director of programming and outreach at the Multicultural Center, mentioned that she chose this individual in particular as a way for students to be able to engage with civil rights leaders while being entertained at the same time.
“[This event] is important to the campus because we always want to celebrate Dr. King’s legacy, and this is a way of celebrating and appreciating Dr. King for all of his hard work that he has done to get us to where we are at,” said Terry. “We just need to remember the icons of the people that have stood for us but know how much more that we have got to do and conquer.”
Terry hopes students will be able to attend as classes begin to start and settle into their first week back while having the event still be relevant in its relation to King’s birthday and honored holiday.
Participants will be invited to partake in a question and answer session with Fikes following her combination of performance and lecture. The webinar will take place Jan. 21 at 7 p.m. Interested ETSU community members can join the Zoom through the updated Zoom link and the password 289579. For more information contact the Multicultural Center at (423) 439-4844 or etsumc@etsu.edu.
