International advocate for disarmament,
racial justice to speak March 30 at URI

KINGSTON, R.I. -- March 8, 2000 -- An international leader for disarmament and racial justice will speak at the University of Rhode Island Thursday, March 30 at 7 p.m.

Clayton Ramey (Ibrahim Malik Abdil-Mu'id), the peace and disarmament coordinator for the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Nyack, N.Y., will speak in Room 277 of the Chafee Social Science Center. His talk, "An Ethical, Nonviolent Foreign Policy, a New Approach to U.S. Foreign Policy and Its Potential," is free and open to the public.

Ramey's activism began in 1968, the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the year of the Tet offensive during the Vietnam War.

That year, he resigned from the Reserve Officers Training Corps at the University of Pennsylvania and read the works of Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X, and became submerged in the radical politics of the Black Liberation Movement.

After college, Clayton became an organizer for African liberation activities while serving as a member of the staff of the National Black Economic Development Conference (BEDC). He represented that group at the United Nations the following year.

In 1973, he joined the staff of the New York-city based Pan African Skills Project (PAS), a group sponsored by African-American church leaders. He worked as a special attache to the Embassy of the United Republic of Tanzania in Washington, D.C. where he assisted in the recruitment and orientation of the professional and technical workers. Clayton represented the organization as a delegate to the Sixth PanAfrican Congress in Tanzania in 1974. He is currently working on a project to archive historical materials from the Pan African Skills Project. Clayton later served as a staff member of the War Resisters League. He embraced the religion of Islam in 1993, and joined the staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1995.

Clayton is a member of the Muslim Peace Fellowship and a contributing editor of its newsletter, As-Salumu Alaykum. He serves on local and national committees of the American Friends Service Committee, the board of directors of the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors, and the board of directors of the Islamic Social Justice Institute. He is an active member of the U.S. Nuclear Abolition Campaign.

Clayton has conducted workshops on social issues throughout the United States, Africa and Asia. His writing s have appeared in The Nonviolent Activist, Fellowship Peace News, the Syracuse Peace Journal, Spinn-Radd and As-SalamuAlaykum.

The program is sponsored by the University of Rhode Island Visiting Scholars Committee, the URI John Hazen White Sr. Center for Ethics and Public Service, the University of Rhode Island Athletics Department and the Rhode Island Committee for Nonviolence Initiative.

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For Further Information: Dave Lavallee 401-874-2116