News Archive 2009-2018

Remembering MLK and Bayard Rustin at Bowdoin Archives

A speech delivered at Bowdoin by Bayard Rustin, with illustration by Thomas Cornell

Goals and Strategies, delivered at Bowdoin by Bayard Rustin (broadside created by Thomas Cornell; provided courtesy of the Bowdoin College Library Department of Special Collections and Archives)

Today is the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, when Martin Luther King Jr. told throngs of ralliers in front of Lincoln Memorial that he had a dream. In the wake of that event, Bowdoin invited both King and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin — one of the chief organizers of the March — to the college’s “Spring Issues Conference” of 1964.

The broadside shown here (created and illustrated by Thomas Cornell, then a member of the art faculty) features a speech that Rustin delivered during his visit to Bowdoin. Click here to hear Martin Luther King’s address to the Bowdoin community.

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