Baton Rouge, Louisiana—   A federal housing programs investigation team leader, a civil rights activist/community organizer, and an author of a portrayal of the search for justice in the South are the featured speakers in the 2009-2010 Southern University Law Center Speakers Series. 

The speakers series will open Friday, September 4, with Charles Martel, chief investigative counsel with the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery, at noon in Room 129 of A.A. Lenoir Hall.

Martel will speak on “Katrina’s Second Storm:  The Failed Federal Response and Proposals for Reform.”

Martel is a lawyer with 25 years experience in private practice, teaching, and government service.  In April 2009 he completed an assignment with the Senate, in which he led an investigation of the federal housing programs implemented in response to Hurricane Katrina.  The investigation led to a 285-page report, “Far From Home: Deficiencies in Federal Disaster Housing Assistance after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and Recommendations for Improvement.”

Prior to his Senate work, Martel did volunteer work in the Gulf Coast region with Habitat for Humanity and the Student Hurricane Network.  

Civil rights activist and community organizer Dave Dennis, a 1961 Freedom Rider, former organizer for the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), and former co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), will be featured on Friday, October 30, at noon. Attorney Dennis will address “The Trojan Horses of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Dennis would have been with the three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, who were murdered in Mississippi, if he had not been home recuperating from bronchitis.

He currently works for the Algebra Project, which provides teacher training to help inner-city and rural students achieve mathematics literacy. Dennis says education is the next civil rights frontier.

On Thursday, February 11, 2010, at noon, New York author Gilbert King will present the series’ closing lecture, “Race, Murder and Capital Punishment in Louisiana, and the Execution of Willie Francis.” 

King is author of The Execution of Willie Francis: Race, Murder, and the Search for Justice in the American South, published by Basic Books in 2008.  His book tells the true story of a 16- year-old boy in Southwestern Louisiana who survived his own execution in 1946.  Willie Francis’s case made front-page headlines around the country and came before the US Supreme Court three times after the governor insisted the youth return to the electric chair.  

King has written for the New York Times, Washington Post and Playboy, and he lives in New York City.  He is currently at work on a book about Thurgood Marshall to be published in 2011 by HarperCollins.

All lectures are free and open to the public.

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