“The Boondocks” cartoonist Aaron McGruderwill address racial issues at 10 a.m. today in the Holmes Student Center’s Carl Sandburg Auditorium.

The event, sponsored by the Center for Black Studies, will mark the end of NIU’s 10th annual African-American Leadership Conference, which began its four-day series of workshops, seminars and speakers on April 1.

Russell Hanes, coordinator of the leadership conference, said the conference committee chose McGruder to speak because the audience would be interested in the young cartoonist, and would be able to relate to him.

McGruder’s comic strip is the controversial, ongoing series of stories about black city kids who are forced to move and adjust to white suburban life. McGruder used inspiration from his own experience dealing with the racially diverse world he grew up in. He was born in Chicago and later moved to the suburbs of Columbia, Md.

The strip first was published in a 1997 issue of an independent student newspaper, The Diamondback, at the University of Maryland, where McGruder attended college. After graduating with a degree in African-American studies, McGruder moved the comic strip to the urban music magazine, The Source.

Today, McGruder resides in Los Angeles, working on television projects and future “Boondocks” ideas. The strip also is published in the Chicago Tribune.