Lane Community College’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. event was held online this year via Zoom, with keynote speaker Dr. Robert Bullard, who is known as the “father of environmental justice.” The event, hosted by Dr. Lamont A. Francies, coincided with King’s birthday on Jan. 15.
Francies is an educator and the senior pastor at Delta Bay Church of Christ in Antioch, California. The Zoom event was held to discuss environmental racism, and how it affects minority communities disproportionately. Bullard has been working and researching environmental justice since 1979, and is the nation’s leading researcher on the subject.
The event opened with “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” considered the “Black national anthem.”