Grammy Award nominee Pierce Freelon will deliver the 2023 Martin Luther King Jr. Campus Commemoration keynote address: “You Won’t Break My Soul: King Jr., Queen Bey and a Legacy of Renaissance in the South." Pierce will explore the living legacies of Black southern renaissance movements.

Freelon is a Grammy-nominated musician, author and educator from Durham. He is the co-creator of Beat Making Lab, an Emmy Award-winning PBS web series and the writer, composer and co-director of the PBS animated series The History of White People in America, an official selection of the Tribeca Film Festival. NPR, Billboard and MSNBC have featured Freelon's Grammy-nominated children’s music album, Black to the Future. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers published his debut children's picture book, Daddy-Daughter Day, in 2022, and his next release, Daddy and Me: Side by Side, will be published in 2023. Freelon is a former Durham city councilman, a husband and a father of two.