Vernon Jordan '57 to Deliver MLK Day Sermon in Durham, NC

January 14, 2010

January 14, 2010, Greencastle, Ind. — "Civil rights leader Vernon Jordan, former adviser to President Bill Clinton, will talk about the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he delivers the MLK Day sermon at Watts Street Baptist Church on Sunday," notes North Carolina's Durham News. The 11 a.m. event is open to the public.

"Leslie Dunbar, a former Watts Street member who now lives in Washington, D.C., hired Jordan in 1963 as executive assistant of the Southern Regional Council, the civil rights organization in Atlanta that Dunbar directed," the newspaper notes. "Later, as director of the council's Voter Education Project, Jordan helped thousands of new minority voters to register and vote throughout the South. Dunbar describes his old friend as 'the most versatile man I've ever met or known.'" (at right: Jordan receiving DePauw's McNaughton Medal for Public Service; May 22, 1993)

Read more at the News' Web site.

Vernon E. Jordan Jr., a 1957 graduate of DePauw University, is the former president of the National Urban League. On Monday, he presented a speech for Vero Beach, Florida's Distinguished Lecturer Series, detailed in this article.

Last month, Jordan was one of eight individuals honored with the Du Bois Medal, the highest honor awarded by the Harvard University Institute of Politics' W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. His previous honors include receiving the Spingarn Medal, NAACP's highest honor for achievement, and the Trumpet Award. Currently a director of Lazard Ltd. and Lazard Group and senior counsel at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, Jordan serves as an advisory member of DePauw's Board of Trustees and has authored Vernon Can Read!: A Memoir and Make It Plain: Standing Up and Speaking Out.

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