Core 5 Year Anniversary Gala Features Ray Arsenault

CHICAGO—Join Core: Leadership, Infrastructure, Futures on Sunday, June 29, from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. ET during ALA Annual 2025 at the Free Library Philadelphia in Philadelphia, PA, for Core’s 5-year Anniversary Gala to celebrate the ALA division’s momentous milestone of 5 years. The event will feature a celebration slideshow, reception and presentation by one of the nation’s leading civil rights historians and author or 12 books, Ray Arsenault.

Arsenault’s speech titled, “John Lewis, Good Trouble, and the Search for the Beloved Community,” will feature the extraordinary life and career of John Lewis (1940-2020), a prominent civil rights leader during the 19960s who later became a highly influential 17-term (1987-2020) congressman representing Atlanta, Georgia. As a tireless proponent of nonviolent direct action, voting rights, racial equality, and social justice, Lewis earned an unmatched reputation for integrity, moral and physical courage, and the willingness to get into what he called “good trouble.” Throughout his life, he exemplified the virtues of compassion, reconciliation, and generosity as he followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s lead searching for “the beloved community,” an ideal society in which no one is systematically excluded or oppressed. In the last decades of his life, he came to symbolise the promise of American democracy for millions of Americans. In my talk, I will pay particular attention to his staunch commitment to the First Amendment and the constitutional right of free expression.

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History emeritus, at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, where he taught from 1980.to 2020 A specialist in the political, social, environmental, and civil rights history of the American South, he has also taught at the University of Minnesota, Brandeis University, the University of Chicago, the Florida State University Study Abroad Center in London, and the Universite d’Angers, in France, where he was a Fulbright Lecturer in 1984-85. A native of Cape Cod, he was educated at Princeton University and Brandeis University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1981.

One of the nation’s leading civil rights historians, he is the author or editor of twelve books, including several highly acclaimed and prize-winning studies: Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (2006; abridged ed. 2011); The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America (2009); Arthur Ashe, A Life (2018); and John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community (2024). Freedom Riders, published by Oxford University Press as part of the Pivotal Moments in American History series, was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice, selected as one of the Washington Post BookWorld’s Best Books of the Year, and awarded the 2007 Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Prize of the Southern Historical Association, as the most important book published in the field of Southern history in 2006. It also served as the basis for the director Stanley Nelson’s celebrated 2011 American Experience documentary film Freedom Riders, which won three Emmys for writing, editing, and documentary excellence, and a 2012 George Peabody Award. The Sound of Freedom and its author were featured in a 2022 American Masters (WNET) documentary directed by Rita Coburn, Marian Anderson: The Whole World in Her Hands. In 2012, the Florida Historical Society presented Arsenault with the Dorothy Dodd Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2019 the Florida Humanities Council honored him with its Lifetime Achievement in Writing Award.

Ticket prices start at $50 and are available for purchase through the ALA Annual Conference registration site. Sponsored tables of 5 or 10 seats are available for purchase through the Core Office.

Visit Core at ALA Annual 2025 for more information on Core's Annual preconferences, special events and programs.

This program is sponsored by Core 2025 Annual Events Diamond Sponsor, OCLC.

About Core

Core: Leadership, Infrastructure, Futures is the national association that advances the profession of librarians and information providers in central roles of leadership and management, collections and technical services, and technology. Our mission is to cultivate and amplify the collective expertise of library workers in core functions through community building, advocacy, and learning. Core is a division of the American Library Association. Follow us on our Blog, Instagram and LinkedIn.