Activist, organizer and United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta will give the 2012 Small-Thomas Lecture at 11:10 a.m. on April 26 in Kimmel Theatre on Cornell College’s campus. Huerta will speak about “Social Justice: Building Movements for Social Change.”
Dolores Huerta is the president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation and co-founder of United Farm Workers (UFW). She has worked as a community organizer and social activist for more than 50 years.
Huerta has played a major role in the American civil rights movement. A founding board member of the Feminist Majority Foundation, she also serves on the board of Ms. Magazine. Huerta has received numerous awards such as the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award from President Bill Clinton in 1998, Ms. Magazine’s one of the three most important women of 1997, Ladies’ Home Journal’s 100 most important women of the 20th Century, the Ohtli award from the Mexican Government, and the Smithsonian Institution-James Smithson Award. She is a former University of California Regent and has earned 11 honorary doctorates from colleges and universities throughout the United States.
As one of the most famous and celebrated Latinas in the United States, Huerta has been an advocate for women’s rights and reproductive freedom. She continues working to develop community leaders for working poor, immigrants, women, and youth with the Dolores Huerta Foundation. She speaks at universities or organizational forums on issues of social justice and public policy.
The Small-Thomas Lectures on the intersection of faith and social justice began in 2000, and is funded by Richard Small, a past chair of the Cornell College Board of Trustees and a 1950 graduate, and his wife, honorary alumna and trustee Norma Thomas Small. Previous speakers include Sean Farren, a key negotiator in efforts to bring peace to Northern Ireland; Edwina Gately, a Catholic laywoman who founded a haven for prostitutes in Chicago; U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill.;the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer Baptist Church; and Amina Wadud, a feminist Islamic scholar.