Civil rights advocate, author, and constitutional law scholar Rebecca Zietlow will lead a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. celebration with “Enforcing Equality,” a discussion of politics and law in the enforcement of civil rights.

Zietlow will draw from her acclaimed books, “Enforcing Equality: Congress, the Constitution and the Protection of Individual Rights,” a study of the history of congressional protection of rights and the implications of that history for constitutional theory, and “The Forgotten Emancipator: James Mitchell Ashley and the Ideological Origins of Reconstruction,” which looks at the egalitarian free labor vision that animated the early Reconstruction Congress and the 13th Amendment.