The Office of Black Church Studies at Duke Divinity School will sponsor the 2014 MLK Jr. Lecture Series featuring guest lecturer Randal Jelks, associate professor of American Studies with a joint appointment in African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas.

Jelks will give a public lecture titled “Benjamin Mays and Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Spiritual and Social Justice Imperative to Re-Think Everyday Violence” on April 1 at 5 p.m. in 0014 Westbrook. He will also serve as guest preacher during two Goodson Chapel worship services. On April 1, he will preach on Judges 11:1-11 in a sermon titled "The Forgotten People." On April 2, he will deliver a sermon on "Challenges and Discomfits of the Prophetic Imagination" based on Jeremiah 18:18.

Jelks is the author of the award-winning African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids and Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement: A Biography. His scholarly interests include African American religious history, black urban political history, black transatlantic religious history, and the history of American social movements.

Each April, the MLK Jr. Lecture Series features national community leaders who address the issues of justice, peace, and liberation in relation to the black religious experience. The series exposes seminarians, Divinity school faculty and alumni, and local preachers and their congregations to preachers whose ministry had impact on the civic spere or scholars whose work has been instrumental in changing the nature of ministry in the church and in the larger world.