King Center to Honor Human Rights Lawyers on 50th Anniversary of King's Death
The King family is commemorating the civil rights leader's April 4, 1968, assassination with peace awards to anti-death penalty and civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson and Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz, presented at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
April 03, 2018 at 05:17 PM
2 minute read
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., King's children will honor two pathbreaking human rights lawyers—Bryan Stevenson and Benjamin Ferencz—at a remembrance ceremony at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.
King's family will lay a wreath on the crypts of King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, at The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, which King's widow founded after his death in 1968.
The King Center will then present the lawyers its highest award, the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Prize.
Stevenson, 58, started his legal career doing death-penalty defense work at Atlanta's Southern Center for Human Rights, as recounted in his acclaimed memoir, “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.” He founded the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery in 1994 to defend anyone sentenced to death in Alabama—the only state that does not fund their legal defense. The work has now broadened into challenging wrongful convictions.
He won a landmark Supreme Court ruling, Miller v. Alabama, in 2012, finding that mandatory life-without-parole for children 17 and under was unconstitutional and then, in Montgomery v. Louisiana (2016), that the decision was retroactive.
Stevenson is working on a memorial in Montgomery to document each of the nearly 4,000 lynchings of black people in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950.
Ferencz, 98, was a Nazi war crimes investigator after World War II and the chief prosecutor for the U.S. Army at one of the 12 military trials it held at Nuremberg. Born in Hungary, he is an American lawyer who went on to become an advocate for creating the International Criminal Court.
The ceremony, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by lunch and a Q&A moderated by Atlanta news anchor Monica Pearson.
Registration is required for the ceremony at www.mlk50forward.org. The King Center is at 449 Auburn Ave. N.E. The luncheon, which requires separate registration, is at Ebenezer Baptist Church's MLK Senior Center at 101 Jackson St. N.E.
The King Center is holding commemorative events through April 9.
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