Ithaca, NY--Malcolm X and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were contemporaries fighting for the same cause, yet they never met. That will change, in a way, in a presentation at Ithaca College on Thursday, January 21. "The Meeting," a fictional account of a meeting between the two, will be staged at 7:00 p.m. in the Emerson Suites, Phillips Hall. The play is free and open to the public.

Written by Jeff Stetson, "The Meeting" is loosely organized around three arm-wrestling matches between King and Malcolm X--a metaphor for the ideological struggle between the passive resistance emphasized by the former and the militancy championed by the latter. Malcolm X was gunned down in 1965 before they could ever meet in real life; King suffered the same fate in 1968. The play received a Louis B. Mayer Award and eight NAACP Theatre Awards and has been staged throughout the United States and Europe.

"The Meeting" is being presented as part of Ithaca College's Racial Awareness Series. The series, which opened last October with a lecture by Latina actress Sonia Manzano, is designed to promote an appreciation of multiculturalism, says Keeon Gregory, director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs. It will conclude in April with a talk by "A" magazine publisher Jeff Yang.