Activist Bree Newsome to speak Thursday in honor of MLK Week

Activist and filmmaker Bree Newsome will come to Lehigh this Thursday, Jan. 28, for a discussion in Baker Hall beginning at 7 p.m. Titled “Activism and Her Climb for Justice,” the event is free and open to the public. The discussion with Newsome will include Madeleine Centrella ’18 and will be moderated by Darius Omar Williams, professor of theatre and Africana Studies.

Thursday’s event will also include the presentation of the MLK Committee Awards to several members of the campus and local community.

Prior to Newsome's talk, Lehigh will screen her brief film, Wake, a Southern Gothic tale of self-righteousness and comeuppance. The film was originally slated to be shown at a noontime discussion on Wednesday, Jan. 27, but was rescheduled as a result of this past weekend’s weather disruption.

Also rescheduled will be the talk between Grammy Award-winning artist Macklemore, Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi, and Lehigh Professor James Peterson, who leads the university’s Africana Studies program. Macklemore and Tometi were slated to come to Lehigh on Sunday, Jan. 24, but the blizzard that impacted much of the East Coast forced a cancellation. MLK organizers say that the talk will be rescheduled.

Newsome is perhaps best known for climbing the South Carolina Statehouse flagpole to remove the Confederate flag in the wake of the shooting of nine church members at the state’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Newsome has long been engaged on social and political issues. Her June 28, 2015 act of defiance involving the Confederate flag led to her arrest for defacing a monument on state grounds. In 2013, she was arrested at a sit-in at the office of then North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis for protesting the state’s restrictive voter ID law.

A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Newsome earned her BFA in film and television. While still in high school, Newsome created an animated short, The Three Princes of Idea, which earned her a $40,000 scholarship from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. At NYU, she wrote and directed a humorous public service announcement titled “Your Ballot, Your Voice,” to encourage youth voter turnout. The PSA went on to win Grand Prize in a PSA competition sponsored by Tisch and MTV. Newsome's short film, the award-winning Wake, recently made its national television debut on the ASPIREtv network.