The 23rd annual Mary Frances Early Lecture will be held at 2 p.m. on Feb. 7 in Mahler Hall at the UGA Center for Continuing Education & Hotel.
This year marks the 61st anniversary of Mary Frances Early’s graduation in 1962 as the first African American to earn a graduate degree from UGA.
Monica Kaufman Pearson (Submitted photo)
To honor Early, Monica Kaufman Pearson will deliver the 2022 lecture. Kaufman Pearson is the first woman and first minority to anchor the daily evening news in Atlanta, where she worked for 37 years at the leading station, WSB-TV. When she retired in 2012, she was honored on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives by the bipartisan delegation of Georgia for her years of service on and off the air to improve the lives of the its citizens.
Since retiring, Kaufman Pearson has been an active participant across many media platforms. Additionally, she pursued her master’s degree at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. In 2014, she graduated magna cum laude. The college awarded Kaufman Pearson with the John Holliman Jr. Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020.
The event is free and open to the public. The lecture is sponsored in part by the Graduate School, Graduate and Professional Scholars (GAPS), the Mary Frances Early College of Education and the Office Institutional Diversity.
