Donna Brazile to Address 25th Annual Unity Breakfast on June 10

Donna Brazile

Donna Brazile, a Washington D.C. political strategist and regular national news contributor, will be the keynote speaker at Muskegon Community College’s 25th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Unity Breakfast, which had been postponed in January to Friday, June 10, at its new location inside the VanDyk Mortgage Convention Center in downtown Muskegon.

The event, which begins at 7:30 a.m. will convert this year to a half-day conference format with back-to-back breakout sessions following the keynote address.

The Unity Breakfast celebrates the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and seeks to build understanding and unity in the community.  Individual tickets are for sale online at www.muskegoncc.edu/unity. The purchase of a table for eight people can be made by contacting dan.rinsema-sybenga@muskegoncc.edu.

Brazile will provide a comprehensive picture of current events in our nation’s capital. The former interim Chair of the Democratic National Committee, she became the first African American woman to serve as the manager of a major party presidential campaign, running the campaign of former Vice President Al Gore.

She is the author of the 2004 best-selling memoir Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics, and the 2017 New York Times Bestseller, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-Ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House. She is a co-author of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics, which won the 2019 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Nonfiction. She is a contributor to the recently published Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019.

Brazile has lectured at over 225 colleges and universities across the country. In 2013, she was appointed by President Barrack Obama to serve on the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Since 2002, Brazile has served as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and spent the fall of 2017 serving as a Joan Shorenstein fellow in Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is currently the Gwendolyn S. and Colbert I. King Endowed Chair in Public Policy at Howard University.

Following the breakfast and Brazile’s talk, two breakout sessions will take place. The first, titled “Benefits of an Inclusive Workplace Culture,” will be led by Ken James, who was recently named as MCC’s Chief Diversity Officer. The second session, titled “Understanding Racial Healthcare Disparities,” will be co-led by Alexis Sims-Dye, who was appointed by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as chair of the Health Committee for the Michigan Black Leadership Advisory Council, and by Mickey Wallace, the Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at HealthWest.