Journalist, activist and former vice-presidential nominee Eugene Puryear will speak at two Salt Lake-area forums this February in honor of Black History Month. Puryear will speak at Hunter Library in West Valley City on Saturday, February 9 at 3:30 p.m.

Puryear's free lectures will offer historical context to the civil rights and Black Power movements, as well as personal context to the modern movement for Black liberation.

In the 2008 and 2016 United States presidential elections, Puryear was the vice-presidential nominee of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), running alongside anti-war, anti-racism and pro-workers' rights activist Gloria La Riva. Puryear is the author of Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America, hosts the daily political talk show By Any Means Necessary and writes regularly for Liberation News.

In addition to his prolific speaking and writing, Puryear has been involved in a wide range of social justice activism for over a decade, serving as a key organizer around police brutality, prisoners’ rights and abuses in the U.S. criminal justice system. Notably, he organized the first demonstration outside Jena, Louisiana for the Jena Six in 2007, and was a founder of the Jobs Not Jails coalition and a co-­founder of the DCFerguson Movement, a Black Lives Matter organization in Washington, D.C.