Since losing two childhood friends in the 1963 Sunday School bombings in Birmingham, Alabama, Fania Davis has dedicated her life to social justice advocacy, becoming a civil rights attorney and a restorative justice scholar, professor and national thought leader.
Davis will give the keynote address during 91短视频鈥檚 Academic and Creative Excellence Festival on Wednesday, April 18, at 7:30 p.m.
She will also speak in a chapel service on Friday, April 20, at 10:00 a.m. Both events are in Lehman Auditorium and are free and open to the public.
The co-founder and director of Restorative Justice for Oakland (California) Youth, Davis is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow with the Council of Independent Colleges.
She has been recognized with the Ubuntu Service to Humanity, the Maloney, the World Trust鈥檚 Healing Justice, the Tikkun (Repair the World) and other awards. The Los Angeles Times has named her a 鈥淣ew Civil Rights Leader of the 21st Century.鈥�
In recent years, she has worked to further truth and reconciliation processes for racial healing in the United States.
A long-time partner of 91短视频鈥檚 , Davis will teach a course in truth-telling, racial healing and restorative justice in this year鈥檚 Summer Peacebuilding Institute. The course addresses 鈥渢he emerging truth-telling, racial healing and reparations initiatives in the United States to address racial violence against African-Americans.鈥�
after high profile police killings of black men that 鈥渢he Truth and Reconciliation process would set us on a collective search for shared truths,鈥� and 鈥渨ould also include facing and beginning to heal the massive historical harms that threaten us all as a nation but take the lives of black and brown children especially.鈥�
It鈥檚 an 鈥渦rgent鈥� need, she wrote, not just for one city like victim Michael Brown鈥檚 Ferguson, Missouri, but for the entire United States. 鈥淐ontinued failure to deal with our country鈥檚 race-based historical traumas dooms us to perpetually re-enact them.鈥�
To begin that process, and with the help of her RJOY colleague and CJP alum Jodie Geddes and current CJP students Renata Loberg and Brenna Case, Davis is documenting and mapping community-level groups across the country who are doing truth and reconciliation work.
The Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellows program connects institutions of higher education with prominent artists, diplomats, journalists, business leaders, and other non-academic professionals for week-long placements to 鈥渃reate better understanding and new connections鈥� and 鈥渟ubstantive dialogue鈥� with students and faculty.