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51������ will welcome speakers of national and international prominence during the second half of the 2019-20 academic year at a series of engaging events designed to promote discussion and thought.

2020 Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Address

​Sonia Manzano, best known for inspiring, educating and delighting children as “Maria” on “Sesame Street,” will deliver the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Address at Elon on Tuesday, Jan. 14, at 6 p.m. in McCrary Theatre. Her lecture will focus on multiracial Latinos and the civil rights movement.

Manzano was a fixture on the iconic “Sesame Street” program for more than 30 years, having broken ground as one of the first Hispanic characters on national television. Raised in the South Bronx, her involvement in the arts was inspired by teachers who encouraged her to audition for the High School of Performing Arts. Following study at Carnegie Mellon University, Manzano landed a role in the original production of the off-Broadway show “Godspell,” and within a year, had joined “Sesame Street,” originally writing scripts for the series. She began her 36-year run as a cast member in 1973.

Twice nominated for an Emmy for her performances on “Sesame Street,” she won 15 Emmys as part of the writing team for the series. Her latest books are “Becoming Maria: Love and Chaos in the South Bronx,” and a Christmas picture book, “Miracle on 133 Street.” She authored the children’s book “No Dogs Allowed in 2007 and the young adult novel “The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano” in 2012.

She received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 43 Daytime Emmy Awards and in 2016 was presented with honorary doctorates from Carnegie Mellon, Tufts University and Lehman College.

2020 Baird Lecture

​The 2020 Baird Lecture will be delivered on Tuesday, April 7, at 7 p.m. in Alumni Gym by Jimmy Wales, a leading technology futurist and the founder of Wikipedia, the fifth-most popular website worldwide, and WikiTribune, an ad-free global news platform.

Named one of TIME’s “100 Most Influential People,” Wales has been recognized by the World Economic Forum as one of the top 250 leaders around the world for his professional accomplishments, commitment to society and potential to shape the future.

Wales founded Nupedia in 2000, a “free encyclopedia” characterized by an extensive peer-review process designed to produce high-quality articles comparable to professional encyclopedias. The addition of “wikis” – a collection of web pages that enable anyone to contribute or modify content — transformed the site into Wikipedia, with Wales providing the founding principles and content, and establishing an Internet-based community of contributors. Currently the English Wikipedia includes more than 5.8 million articles, with 567 articles added each day. Wikipedia develops at a rate of 1.8 edits per second.

Wales is a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and serves on the boards of Socialtext, a provider of wiki technology to businesses, and the nonprofit organization Creative Commons.

Wales’s address will be part of Elon’s Baird Lecture Series, which was endowed in 2001 by a gift from James H. Baird and his late wife, Jane M. Baird, of Burlington, N.C.

2020 James P. Elder Lecture and Phi Beta Kappa Lecture

​Frederick M. Lawrence, renowned civil rights scholar, author, secretary/CEO of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and former president of Brandeis University, will deliver the Elder Lecture and Phi Beta Kappa Lecture on Thursday, April 16, at 6:30 p.m. in Whitley Auditorium.

An accomplished scholar, teacher and attorney, Lawrence is one of the nation’s leading experts on civil rights, free expression and bias crimes. A distinguished lecturer at the Georgetown Law Center, he previously served as president of Brandeis University, dean of the George Washington University Law School and visiting professor and senior research scholar at Yale Law School.

He is the author of “Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law,” a book that examined bias-motivated violence and the laws governing how that violence is punished in the United States. He is an opinion contributor to The Hill and U.S. News & World Report, and frequently contributes opinion pieces to Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Observer, The New York Daily News and The Huffington Post.

At Phi Beta Kappa, he has focused on advocacy for the arts, humanities and sciences, championing free expression, free inquiry and academic freedom. The nation’s first and most prestigious honor society, Phi Beta Kappa has 286 chapters, including Elon’s chapter, and 50 alumni associations.

More information about 51������’s annual Speaker Series is available here.