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With close to a million people looking on, President Barack Obama renewed his oath of office yesterday on the steps of the Capitol Building with a speech sprinkled with civil rights issues. Invoking the memory of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the President proclaimed, “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths –- that all of us are created equal –- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.”

Although the United States has re-elected its first African American President to another four years in office, the cultural chasm between White and Black America continues to exist and racism remains a reality. Now, a new book called ‘Gather at the Table’ by Thomas Norman De Wolf and Sharon Leslie Morgan offers up a brutally honest conversation about race which few people in this country dare to pursue. De Wolf, a white man who hails from one of the largest slave trading families in the South and Morgan, an African American woman whose ancestors were brought to this country as slaves recount their mutual journey to understand how each of their lives have been impacted by the ugly history of slavery.

After meeting in 2008 at a program called Coming to the Table set up by Eastern Mennonite University, De Wolf and Morgan spent the next three years traveling more than 100,000 miles through the United States visiting each other’s families, friends and historical sites associated with slavery. As they go through their travels we see each encounter, through both of their eyes and share as they try to heal the wounds left by slavery and the stench of racism which still lay in its wake.

GUESTS: Sharon Leslie Morgan, is founder of www.OurBlackAncestry.com and a multicultural marketing consultant; Thomas Norman De Wolf is author of Inheriting the Trade. Both Sharon and Thomas are co-authors of a new book Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade

Local Author Appearances:

January 23, 2013, 5:00pm: La Pintoresca Library, 1355 North Raymond Avenue Pasadena, CA

January 25, 2013, 7:00pm: Pacific Oaks College, 55 Eureka St, Building 45, Pasadena, CA, sponsored by CARE/Multicultural Healing (NOTE: Parking is free – All guests must sign in at building 55 before arriving at the event in Building 45)

January 26, 2013: 2:00pm: Pomona First Christian Church, 1751 Park Ave., Pomona, CA

Visit www.gatheratthetable.net for more information.