Location
Dear Friends,
We look forward to seeing you at the August 9 session of the Racial Justice and Unity Forum. Our topic "Difficult Questions Facing the Bahá'í Community" will feature four distinguished members of the Bahá'í community who have extensive experience addressing issues of racial prejudice. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Gwen Etter-Lewis-Lewis, professor of Intercultural Studies at Miami University. The panel will feature:
- Van Gilmer--Choral director and soloist who has performed, arranged and conducted music for over sixty years. Born and raised in the Jim Crow south of Greensboro, North Carolina, Van’s early encounters with racism helped to shape his activism as a non-violent protestor during the student sit-in movement of the early 1960’s. Van Gilmer is known for his honesty and eloquence when speaking about racial prejudice.
- Masud Olufani--Atlanta based actor, mixed media artist, and writer whose studio practice is rooted in the discipline of sculpture. He has presented at the Association of Bahá'í Studies and on bahaiteaching.org.
- Sahar D. Sattarzadeh--Assistant Professor of Education Studies at DePauw University and a research associate at the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET) at Nelson Mandela University. She believes that scholarship and teaching have the capacity to serve as forms of "activism," an ever-evolving means to achieving social transformation.
Sincerely,
RJU Forum Planners
"We ardently pray that the American people will grasp the possibilities of this moment to create a consequential reform of the social order that will free it from the pernicious effects of racial prejudice and will hasten the attainment of a just, diverse, and united society that can increasingly manifest the oneness of the human family."
--Universal House of Justice, July 22, 2020