Durham
Chrisette Michele

Carolina TheatreChrisette Michele is a Grammy winner with chart success to her nameher 2009 album, Epiphany, hit No. 1, and she’s had a handful of hit singles. She’s got hook credits with Nas, Jay-Z, The Game and others, and her voiceas fine and frail as porcelain, handling songs about the end of love with grace and experienceis a wonder. So it’s a bit perplexing to see her confined to spaces as small as the Carolina, though its intimacy certainly suits her voice. $29–$35. Laura Izibor opens. See www.carolinatheatre.org. Grayson Currin

Durham
The Civil Rights Roots of Healthcare Activism

John Hope Franklin Center, Duke CampusDiscrimination in health care has a long and troubling history. In the early 1960s, a group of doctors formed the Medical Committee for Civil Rights (later renamed the Medical Committee for Human Rights) to minister to activists traveling to Mississippi to organize black voters in 1964. The ad hoc group became permanent as the doctors continued to provide medical supportand a violence-dampening presenceto civil rights workers and demonstrators throughout the 1960s. As they encountered gross inequities in medical delivery in the Jim Crow South, they created community health centers and agitated for a better and more just health care system.

Historian John Dittmer, author of Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Healthcare, will speak with Sharon Bynum-Elliott, co-founder of community health care provider CAARE Inc., in a panel discussion on the roots of health care activism in the civil rights movement. Dittmer says that today, many of the original doctors from the MCHR, now in their 70s and 80s, are prominent advocates for a single-payer health care plan (which, from the beginning of talks last year, was DOA in Congress, where even a weak public option was shouted down by fearmongering Republicans and “middle-of-the-road,” industry-friendly Democrats). Although today’s injustices are less black-and-white (in both senses of the term), inequity and exclusion from access to health care remain. The discussion starts at noon and is open to the public. Lunch will be served. E-mail fhi@duke.edu with questions. Marc Maximov