Martin Luther King, Jr. Service Features Ten Commandments for Race Relations
Converse invites the public to join in the 2010 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day service to hear Dr. Andrew Manis present The Ten Commandments for Black-White Relations. The event will be held Thursday, January 21 at 7:30 p.m. in Kuhn Hall Room 203.
Dr. Andrew M. Manis is associate professor of history at Macon State College in Macon, Georgia. He is the author or editor of four books, all dealing with religion, race relations, and the civil rights movement. His titles include: Southern Civil Religions in Conflict: Civil Rights and the Culture War and Birmingham Revolutionaries: Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.
His book A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, won a number of prizes including the 2000 Lillian Smith Book Award. It was also a runner-up for the 2001 Louisville Grawemeyer Award and named by Clayborne Carson of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project as one of the twenty-seven “essential books” on the civil rights movement.
His most recent book, Macon Black and White: An Unutterable Separation in the American Century won the 2005 Georgia Author of the Year Award for History and was a semifinalist for the 2005 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
Dr. Manis’s scholarship has earned a number of prestigious fellowships and grants. Among these are the Mellon Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania (1988), the Pew Evangelical Scholars Fellowship, University of Notre Dame (1994‑1995), and Young Scholars in American Religion, Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis (1992‑1993). He has studied religion, race and politics through National Endowment for the Humanities grants at Princeton University, Rice University and the University of Mississippi.
In 2005, Dr. Manis received a Golden Apple Award from Central High School in Macon, Georgia. This award goes to a graduating senior’s “most influential” teacher. In 2006 he received the Governor’s Award in the Humanities from the Georgia Humanities Council. Most recently, he spent the spring semester of 2009 as a Fulbright Fellow and Visiting Professor at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.