Students and faculty at NIU will have the opportunity to hear a lecture titled “The Vanguard in a New World Order.”

“The lecture is intended to help students get a perspective of what kind of leadership roles they may want to play,” said George Amedee, chairman of the Political Action Committee of the Black Graduate Student Association.

Speaker Ron Daniels is president of the Institute for Community Organization and Development in Youngstown, Ohio, and advocate for an African-American-led independent presidential candidacy in 1992. He will give the lecture Feb. 13 at 7:30 p.m. in the Carl Sandburg Auditorium in the Holmes Student Center.

The lecture is sponsored by the BGSA in conjunction with Black Heritage Month. Daniels will give a mini-lecture around 3:30 p.m. to the BGSA and then present his major lecture at the student center that night.

The lecture is “designed to be thought-provoking in helping students set an agenda for the coming century in the areas of education, housing, health care and politics,” Amedee said.

Daniels has been on the “speaking circuit” at “more than 500 colleges and universities over the past 20 years,” Amedee said. He also has been “involved in a number of activities related to the push for an independent black political agenda,” he added.

He was chairperson of the founding convention of the National Black Independent Political Party and later elected chairperson of the NBIPP. He was also director of Jesse Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition in 1987 and, in 1988, served as deputy campaign manager for Jackson’s presidential campaign.

Daniels has appeared on CBS‘ “News Night Watch,” Black Entertainment Television’s “Our Voices,” C-Span and CNN’s “Inside Politics.”

He also writes a weekly column titled “Vantage Point,” which is in over 87 African-American progressive newspapers nationwide.