Activist and scholar Angela Davis is among the list of noted speakers at Fayetteville State University (FSU) for the 2011-2012 school year.

Each academic year, FSU Chancellor James A. Anderson sponsors a number of events that provide an opportunity for the public to experience world-renowned speakers on campus of their hometown regional university. All of the speaker presentations are free and open to the public.

Journalist Eugene Robinson will serve as speaker for fall convocation on Sept. 15, at 2 p.m. in J.W. Seabrook Auditorium.

Fall convocation signifies the official opening of the academic school year. Robinson's book, "Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America," is the selection for the Chancellor's Book Club and is required reading for all incoming freshmen.

Robinson uses his twice-weekly column in The Washington Post to pick American society apart and then put it back together again in unexpected and revelatory new ways. His remarkable storytelling ability has won him wide acclaim, most notably as the winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for his commentary on the 2008 presidential race that resulted in the election of America's first African-American president.

In a 25-year career at The Washington Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper's award-winning Style section. He has written books about race in Brazil and music in Cuba, covered a heavyweight championship fight, witnessed riots in Philadelphia and a murder trial in the deepest Amazon, and sat with presidents and dictators and the Queen of England.

Robinson was born and raised in Orangeburg, S.C. He remembers the culminating years of the civil rights movement. The "Orangeburg Massacre," a 1968 incident in which police fired on students protesting a segregated bowling alley and killed three unarmed young men, took place within sight of his house just a few hundred yards away.

Kicking off the Chancellor's Distinguished Speaker Series is Dr. Sharon Raynor. In conjunction with the City of Fayetteville's Heroes and Homecoming Celebration, an event honoring Vietnam veterans, Raynor will speak on Nov. 9, at 6 p.m. in J.W. Seabrook Auditorium. Raynor, a native of Clinton, has written extensively on and worked with Vietnam veterans.

Raynor is an associate professor of English and the Mott University Distinguished Professor at Johnson C. Smith University. She is also the recipient of the Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship through the Fletcher Foundation and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University.

In previous years, she served as the interim director of the Honors College and the department chair of English and foreign languages at Johnson C. Smith University, and as a lecturer in the English Department at East Carolina University. She completed her doctorate degree in literature and criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in August 2003. She received both her bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in multicultural literature at East Carolina University. Her doctoral dissertation is titled "Shattered Silence and Restored Souls: Bearing Witness and Testifying to Trauma and Truth in the Narratives of Black Vietnam Veterans."

Since 1999, she has written and directed two oral history projects sponsored by the North Carolina Humanities Council titled "Breaking the Silence: The Unspoken Brotherhood of Vietnam Veterans," and "Soldier-to-Soldier: Men and Women Share Their Legacy of War."

On Nov. 17, at 6 p.m. in J.W. Seabrook Auditorium, Dr. Thomas "Danny" Boston will speak. Boston is a professor of economics in the School of Economics at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. He is also CEO of EuQuant, which is an economic consulting and research company.

A native of Jacksonville, Fla., he received a bachelor's degree from West Virginia State University and a master's degree and doctorate in economics from Cornell University. Graduating as a commissioned officer from WVSU, he attained the rank of captain in the U.S. Army and was awarded the Purple Heart. His appointment to the Georgia Tech faculty began in 1985.

Boston's specialization is program performance evaluation, and he focuses on the following topics: minority and small business performance and entrepreneurship; public housing revitalization and residential mobility programs; public/private investment impacts on communities and regional economies; Millennium Development Goals monitoring and evaluation in West Africa.

He contributes regularly to CNN by joining the anchor desk monthly to discuss the Labor Department's Report on Employment and Unemployment.

Boston has testified six times before committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives regarding federal minority business policies and programs and public housing assistance policies.

He is a consultant to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and assists members of Congress and committees that have oversight over the nation's minority and small business programs.

Boston is the former recipient of Georgia Tech's "Undergraduate Professor of the Year" award, the Ivan Allen College "Legacy Award" and the State of Georgia Economics Educator of the Year award.

Angela Davis kicks off the spring 2012 series with a presentation on Jan. 17, at 6 p.m. in J.W. Seabrook Auditorium.

Through her activism and scholarship over the last decades, Davis has been deeply involved in our nation's quest for social justice. Her work as an educator - both at the university level and in the larger public sphere - has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice.

Davis' teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College and UC Berkeley. She also has taught at UCLA, Vassar, the Claremont Colleges and Stanford University. She spent the last 15 years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is now professor emerita of history of consciousness, an interdisciplinary doctorate program, and of feminist studies.

Davis is the author of eight books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and South America.

In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination.

She draws upon her own experiences in the early 1970s as a person who spent 18 months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted List." She has also conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment.

Davis is a founding member Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia, that works in solidarity with women in prison.

Black History Month will feature FSU alumnus Charles E. Jones Feb. 7, at 2 p.m. in Seabrook Auditorium.

Jones, a 1976 graduate of FSU, is the founding chair of the Department of African American Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He currently serves as president of the National Council for Black Studies.

Jones earned a doctorate in political science at Washington State University. He is a former Congressional Black Caucus Graduate Fellow and a Fulbright Hayes Fellow. Jones' teaching and research interests center on African-American politics and African-American studies. His past research projects have focused on African-Americans in the legislative process; black electoral success in majority white districts and African-American social movements.

He has published extensively in scholarly journals and anthologies on African-American politics and African-American Studies. Jones is the editor of the anthology titled "Black Panther Party Reconsidered."

He is the associate editor of the International Journal of Africana Studies and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Black Studies, National Political Science Review, and the Journal of African-American Studies.

Rounding out the series is bank executive Kim Saunders. She will be speaking in celebration of Women's History Month on March 6, at 2 p.m. in J.W. Seabrook Auditorium.

Saunders is the president and CEO of Mechanics and Farmers Bank (M&F) and its parent -company, M&F Bancorp, Inc. Before coming to M&F in February 2007, Saunders was president and CEO at Consolidated Bank and Trust Company (CB&T). Saunders was the second female -president and CEO in CB&T's history, a distinction she holds at M&F Bank as well. As part of M&F's grand entrance into its next great century, Saunders guided M&F Bank through its first acquisition in 85 years, Mutual Community Savings Bank. As a result, M&F Bank is now a $300 million institution based in five major North Carolina cities - Durham, Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston-Salem and Charlotte.

Saunders has more than 28 years banking experience with various regulated commercial banks in a number of progressively responsible positions.

She has expertise in credit administration, asset management, economic development and turn-around management, as well in developing policy and lending programs for de novo financial institutions.

Saunders holds a bachelor's degree in economics from the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania and an honorary -doctorate from Shaw University.

FSU is the second-oldest public institution in North Carolina. A member of the University of North Carolina System, FSU has nearly 6,000 students and offers degrees in more than 60 undergraduate and graduate degree -programs.

For more information, call (910) 672-1724.