“Many athletes visit kids in hospitals, start foundations that fix inner-city playgrounds, create scholarship funds to help poor students attend college and make commercials urging kids to stay in school and say no to drugs. But when it comes to political dissent, few speak out on big issues like war, sweatshop labor, environmental concerns or the increasing gap between rich and poor. While Hollywood celebrities frequently lend their fame and fortune to candidates and causes, athletes are expected to perform, not pontificate. On the few occasions when they do express themselves, they are often met with derision and contempt.”
     ~ Kelly Candaele and Peter Dreier, “Where Are the Jocks for Justice?” in The Nation, June 28, 2004

            In conjunction with its exhibition “The Times They Were A-Changin’: Baseball in the Age of Aquarius” at the Burbank Central Library, the Baseball Reliquary will present a lecture by noted journalists and educators Kelly Candaele and Peter Dreier. The lecture program will be held on Wednesday, October 6, 2004 at 7:00 PM in the Burbank Central Library Auditorium, 110 N. Glenoaks Blvd., and is open to the public and free of charge.
            Entitled “Where Are the Jocks for Justice?,” the lecture is based on Candaele’s and Dreier’s provocative article of the same title which was published earlier this year in The Nation. The authors contend that while the 1960s and ‘70s found some prominent athletes using their celebrity status to speak out on important issues, particularly civil rights and Vietnam, there has been a significant drop in activism among contemporary athletes, due in part to cultural changes and lucrative endorsements.
            Kelly Candaele has written for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, The Nation, and other national publications. His writing has largely focused on the peace process in Northern Ireland and on Los Angeles politics. He has produced and directed a number of documentary films, winning an Emmy for A League of Their Own, about his mother’s years as a player in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in the 1940s; he also wrote the script for the feature film of the same title. In 1996, Candaele was elected to the board of directors of the Los Angeles Community College District. He served as board president in 2000 and was re-elected to a second four-year term in 2002.
            Peter Dreier is the Dr. E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Program at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He joined the Occidental faculty in 1993 after serving for nine years as Director of Housing at the Boston Redevelopment Authority and senior policy advisor to Boston Mayor Ray Flynn. For more than two decades, Dreier has been involved in urban policy as a scholar, a government official, a journalist, and an activist for reform. He is co-author of the forthcoming book, The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City (University of California Press). He has written on a variety of baseball subjects for both local and national publications. Although a lifelong Democrat, Dreier allowed his parents to take him to a Richard Nixon rally in his New Jersey hometown in 1960 for the sole purpose of meeting Jackie Robinson.
            For further information on the lecture, contact the Baseball Reliquary by phone at (626) 791-7647 or by e-mail at skpubs@earthlink.net. For directions, contact the Burbank Central Library at (818) 238-5600.
            This program is supported in part by a grant from the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.