At Kentucky’s recent 28th Annual Equal Employment Opportunity Conference, the Commonwealth’s Personnel Cabinet Secretary presented the annual Charles W. Anderson Laureate Award to Gerald L. Smith, associate professor of history in the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences.

Associate professor of history and UK alumnus Gerald Smith hopes to continue researching the connection between King and religion.

Members of the public and especially young people are encouraged to attend "Aiming for New Heights," a celebration of the Lexington Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), the group of black and white individuals largely responsible for Kentucky’s civil rights movement.

Gerald Smith has spent a lifetime studying the nation’s African-American leaders, including the formative years of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.