Celebrate Black History Month with these upcoming events at the SCV Senior Center.

The Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes: Poetry Recital and Lecture will be on Friday, February 10, 2017 at the SCV Senior Center. The event is free and will be from 1 to 2 p.m.

Ms. Tiffany Travillion, author and composer, will perform a poetry recitation and lecture of renowned poets and activists Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes. A variety of Black-American inventions and patents will be on display.

Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes were African-American poets and activists. Ms. Angelou published autobiographies, books of essays and poetry, and was credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. Mr. Hughes was a novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry.

Refreshments will be served.

Contact: Robin Clough, rclough@scv-seniorcenter.org, 661-259-9444 for more information.

The SCV Senior Center Scholar Series presents Frederick Douglass: Abolitionist, Writer, and Orator on Wednesday, February 22 from 10 to 11 a.m. This event is also free and will be at the SCV Senior Center.

Brilliant and heroic, Frederick Douglass became a symbol of his age and a unique voice for humanism and social justice. Join Professor Lissa Brassfield for a fascinating presentation about this African-American abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman.

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writings.

Douglass immortalized his years as a slave in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). This and two subsequent autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), mark his greatest contributions to American culture.

Brilliant, heroic, and complex, Douglass became a symbol of his age and a unique voice for humanism and social justice. He spoke and wrote on behalf of a variety of reform causes: women’s rights, temperance, peace, land reform, free public education, and the abolition of capital punishment. But he devoted the bulk of his time, immense talent, and boundless energy to ending slavery and gaining equal rights for African Americans.

Join Professor Lissa Brassfield for this fascinating presentation.

Contact: Robin Clough, rclough@scv-seniorcenter.org, 661-259-9444 for more information.