Activist and writer Shaun King is speaking at Duke tonight, as part of the university’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. week commemoration, this year themed “Why Words Matter: From Dissent to Dialogue.”
Tickets to see the firebrand and civil rights activist sold out swiftly. Commenters on a Facebook page for the event implored him to visit more college campuses in the area; one proclaimed King an “American hero.”
King is a columnist for The Intercept, a writer-in-residence at Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project, and former reporter for the New York Daily News. He is the co-founder of the Real Justice PAC, which supports progressive candidates for district attorney, and recently announced plans to revive The North Star, the 19th-century newspaper founded by Frederick Douglass.
The Black Lives Matter activist is known for his active social media presence, which he uses to spread awareness about injustice and anit-black crime and to publicly identify the perpetrators of it, crowd-sourcing help from his one million followers along the way. He helped secure the arrest of several white supremacists for beating a black man during the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally and recently led police to the man suspected of shooting of a seven-year-old girl in Texas.
King’s brand of activism has also been criticized. Last year, he help spread a later-discredited accusation of sexual assault against a Texas state trooper (King wrote that he had been lied to). Questions have also been raised about the fate of money he has raised on behalf of families. He has vehemently denied misappropriating funds, even threatening to sue over the accusations.
You can watch a live-stream of the event here. Follow the INDY’s live coverage below.
