Poultney
posted
Jan 17, 2013
Green Mountain College will host Timothy Patrick McCarthy,
director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard's Kennedy
School, for a public address Jan. 24 at 9:30 a.m. in the East Room
(Withey Hall). McCarthy will speak as the school's 2013 Voices
of
Community Plenary Speaker in honor of the ideals of Martin
Luther King, Jr. The title of his talk is "Human Rights, Human
Wrongs: The Long History of Slavery and Abolition," and focuses on
modern slavery and the sex slave trade.
A historian of politics and social movements, McCarthy is a
lecturer on history and literature and on public policy at Harvard
University, and is the author of four books including The Radical
Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition and
The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the People's
Historian. His fifth book, Stonewall's Children: A Modern Story of
Liberation, Loss, and Love, will be published next spring.
In addition to his writing and teaching, McCarthy has devoted
his life to public service and social justice, particularly around
issues of racial, sexual, and socioeconomic justice, and
educational equity. Since 1990, he has been a Big Brother to
Malcolm Green, now 26, whom he met while volunteering in the
Cambridge public schools as an undergraduate. As founding director
of Harvard's Alternative Spring Break Church Rebuilding Program, he
has spent the last fifteen years organizing groups of
undergraduates to help rebuild African-American churches destroyed
in arson attacks. In honor of this work, McCarthy received the 2007
Humble Servant Award from the National Coalition for Burned
Churches, and the 2010 Advocate Award from the Phillips Brooks
House Association.
Since 2001, McCarthy has also directed and taught in the Boston
Clemente Course, a multi-disciplinary college humanities course
offered free of charge to low-income adults through the Codman
Square Health Center in Dorchester, Mass.
McCarthy graduated with honors in history and literature from
Harvard and earned his M.A., M.Phil., and PhD in history from
Columbia University.
The only son and grandson of public school teachers and factory
workers, McCarthy is an award-winning teacher and advisor whose
courses are consistently among the most popular and highly rated at
Harvard. He is the recipient of Harvard's Stephen Botein Prize for
Excellence in Teaching (2000), John R. Marquand Award for
Exceptional Advising and Counseling (2003) and the Derek Bok
Certificate for Teaching Excellence (2006-2012).
The event is free and open to the public.
