Campus Connection

For more than 50 years, James Parker has been an activist student, teacher, scholar and public servant on behalf of underrepresented communities in the spirit of justice and non-violence advocated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Parker, a UW-L professor emeritus of history, will receive the 2013 Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award as part of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Celebration Monday, Jan. 21, at the Viterbo University Fine Arts Center Main Theatre. The event has been held for almost a decade to celebrate the legacy of King. The MLK Jr. Leadership Award is given to an individual who has done substantial community work in areas including, social justice, equality and cultural diversity. Previous La Crosse area recipients are Roberta Stevens, Thomas Harris, Andrea Hansen, and Maureen Freedland. Parker’s commitment to racial and gender equity started at an early age and has been interwoven into his daily life. As a university student in the 1960s, he was a committed activist, raising money for participants in the Selma March and participating in the Open Housing campaign in Maryland. In the weeks following King’s death in April 1968, he was one of only three civilians with curfew access to the District of Columbia while under martial law, and was allowed to deliver food to families in the area around Howard University. In June of that year, he participated in the Poor People’s March on Washington at Resurrection City. Parker came to UW-La Crosse in 1968, and retired in 2003 after 34 years. He was awarded emeritus status by three separate departments, including History, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. As a teacher at UW-L, Parker developed the first courses in African American History (1969) and, with Martin Zanger, Native American History (1970). Parker went on to create and teach other courses on race and gender, including what became the Ethnic and Racial Studies introductory course in 1975, along with three other courses. This fall he taught the Modern Civil Rights Movement course for the sixth and final time. As a scholar of race relations and gender, Parker has written several articles and lectured in the U.S. and Great Britain on affirmative action, the law and gender, and constitutional law and racism. In 1987, Parker did a post-doctoral sabbatical, A Historical Study of Patriarchy and Feminist Theory, at UW-Madison, which led to his appointment as an honorary fellow of the UW-Madison Women's Studies Research Center, 1987-88. As an administrator, Parker was cofounder and/or coordinator from 1973-79 of the entities now known as the Office of Multicultural Student Services and the Ethnic and Racial Studies Department. Additionally, he cofounded and/or directed six innovative minority programs to assist students of color, including the third pre-college program in the U.S. In 2004, Parker was appointed by former Gov. Jim Doyle to the State of Wisconsin Affirmative Action Council, which advises the Office of State Employment Relations and UW System on fair employment for women, people of color and the disability community. He was elected chair in 2005 and conducted state hearings on the effectiveness of Affirmative Action. In this capacity, he has spoken at a dozen conferences on affirmative action since elected. In 2006 he was appointed to and served on the UW System Committee on the Status of Women. Parker has served as a board member for New Horizons Women’s Shelter and on the Single Parent Self-Sufficiency Program Board of Directors. In 1997, Parker established the UW-L Multicultural Alumni Award, which in 2011 was renamed the Parker Multicultural Alumni Award. Parker has established two substantial financial scholarships at UW-L for Students of Color who have a demonstrated awareness of the politics of race and for elementary education majors who are committed to using their instruction to combat racism, sexism, homophobia and ableism. He has been an active contributor to create positive change in so many areas for over half a century is a remarkable testimony to his energetic devotion to King’s legacy. In addition to the presentation of the MLK Jr. Leadership Award, the event will also feature music by the Viterbo Concert Choir ,9th Street Singers and the Coulee Region Gospel Choir and the presentation of the High School Essay Award. The event is sponsored by the La Crosse Martin Luther King Jr. Community Celebration Planning Committee.

If you go:

What: Annual Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. celebration When: 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 21 Where: Viterbo University Fine Arts Center Main Theatre, 929 Jackson St., La Crosse Admission: Free Keynote speaker: Rev. Andre Johnson will present “From a Dream to a Mountain Top and Beyond: Martin Luther King Jr. and the African American Prophetic Tradition.”