Project News

For many people, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech is his landmark speech.But for ASU english professor Neal Lester, a more telling moment came in the speech King gave at a visit to Stanford University in 1967 in a speech called “The Other America.” “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long and it bends towards justice," King said in the speech. The speech shows a complex, little-known side to the famed civil rights activist, Lester said. “I facilitated a program back in the summer that was on the anniversary of King’s death,” Lester said. “That was an opportunity for me to try to move people, and myself, away from these sugar-coated images that idolize King.”

The Town of Paradise Valley hosted its annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration Monday, Jan. 21 at Town Hall, 6401 E. Lincoln Drive, which featured a speaker, music and the announcement of the essay contest winners.

Do. The. Work.

It was that idea conveyed by Dr. Neal Lester during a celebration honoring the sacrifice and service by those who made the dream of racial equality a perception of reality in the United States of America.

Countless deplorable acts against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his family, his followers and his perspective did not stop the man whose legacy is honored and observed by all American communities on the third Monday of January.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day is the only National Day of Service named after an American civil rights pioneer and the namesake of an award bestowed upon Dr. Lester, an Arizona State University professor.

Arizona State University Professor Neal Lester will be honored in two separate celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr., but he’s more than a little wistful about all the memorials that will be taking place in advance of and on the slain civil rights leader’s birthday Monday.

Arizona State University Professor Neal A. Lester agrees with poet Maya Angelou’s words: “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.” But that doesn't mean that he sees no value in our differences. So he challenges people to recognize, celebrate and embrace those differences.

It is so easy to point out challenges and problems and even point fingers of blame at others as we look around and pay close attention to what’s happening in our world – the disappointments, the disagreements, the fights, the incivility and the intolerance.

Discarded pizza boxes. Empty energy-drink cans. Dozens dancing. And hundreds of people cracking, hacking and tapping away on laptops during a 36-hour marathon binge.

When you think about hackers, you might think of headlines about Russian hacking into the 2016 election or Facebook’s latest revelations about millions of its users’ information being hacked.

Mention the word “hackathon,” and the people who don’t look puzzled probably think of a group of geeks locked in a room, huddling over computers and working on codes.

The annual Hacks for Humanity put on by Arizona State University’s Project Humanities is a 36-hour hackathon that challenges participants to come up with new technologies to help solve local and global problems.