Every year, the national Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday signals the start of one of the most hectic travel seasons for high-profile Black scholars, who crisscross the nation throughout much of February delivering speech after speech on college campuses during Black History Month.
In exchange, colleges and universities are often willing to pay hefty honorariums—in some cases up to $40,000—to lure a well-known speaker that can attract a massive crowd.
“I haven’t seen a lot of change over the years,” says Mark Castel, president of AEI Speakers in Boston, adding that prominent Black academics have always been popular on colleges and universities and are often booked more than a year in advance. “There has been a groundswell since the King holiday was first established, and colleges want to bring in people who can talk about the ideas that Dr. King brought forth for equality.”
Castel’s Boston-based company represents an impressive list of African Americans, from actress Kerry Washington to Black academics like Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin, and Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, the popular president of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Bernice King, daughter of the slain civil rights leader, is also represented by AEI.
Castel says that, over the last decade, colleges and universities as well as the corporate community have invested resources each year to hire someone who can speak about the importance of diversity.
“Often people are looking for someone for that day,” he says of the King holiday, which will be celebrated this year on Monday, Jan. 18, three days after what would have been King’s 87th birthday had he not been gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
