A packed house in the Daniels Theater last night (Feb. 13) heard renowned scholar, author and journalist Melissa Harris-Perry deliver “Black Is…Complicated,” a rousing talk on the challenges facing contemporary black Americans.

* Read an article and watch a video of Harris-Perry’s visit to Clark before her talk, featured in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. Watch the News Hub for an upcoming story about the presentation. *

Asked how she fit the Clark visit into her busy schedule, Harris-Perry lauded Clark’s Difficult Dialogues project and told a news reporter: “Having gone to a small private liberal arts school (Wake Forest) I really like the idea of that. To me that’s exactly why you go to a school like Clark — to have the difficult dialogues. To have students actually sign up for something called ‘difficult’ really kind of made me feel excited.”

Harris-Perry is Professor of Political Science at Tulane University, where she is founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South. She is a columnist for the Nation, and appears regularly on MSNBC and will host her own show on MSNBC in February.

Her appearance was a part of Clark’s ongoing President’s Lecture Series and the African American Intellectual Culture Series, and was sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities’ Difficult Dialogues program.

Harris-Perry also was presented with a key to the City of Worcester, which she tweeted was the “BEST post-lecture gift ever!”