CONWAY, SC – Horry County Democratic Party (HCDP) is pleased to announce that our 11th Annual SHORE Fundraising Dinner speaker will be journalist Karen Gray Houston, author of Daughter of the Boycott, Carrying on a Montgomery Family’s Civil Rights Legacy on October 22nd, 2023.
Houston’s book, published in May 2020, recounts her father’s leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott that followed the police shooting of Hillard Brooks, a Black man, during an encounter involving a ride on a Montgomery, AL bus.
Gray and other fellow veterans, outraged about the unjustifiable fatal shooting, protested, staging a major march against police brutality. Five years later, her father, Thomas Gray, and her uncle, Fred D. Gray, led a boycott protesting the city’s segregated buses. Fred Gray represented Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and others in the Supreme Court case that forced Alabama to desegregate its buses.
Karen Gray Houston is an award-winning journalist, whose career in broadcast news has spanned 41 years at radio and television stations and networks in Boston, New York City and Washington, DC. She retired from WTTG-TV, Fox-5 in Washington, DC, in May of 2014 after nearly 20 years as a local news reporter. Karen worked as a radio and TV correspondent for NBC News covering the Reagan White House, was a reporter/anchor for WTOP News-radio in DC and WHDH-AM in Boston and anchored on the ABC Radio Network. Karen was a writer/associate producer at WCBS-TV in New York and a reporter/writer/editor with United Press International in Boston.
“We are thrilled that Karen Gray Houston has accepted our invitation to be the keynote speaker at this year’s SHORE dinner,” said HCDP Chair Alester Linton-Pryor. “She is an award-winning broadcast journalist, an outstanding storyteller, and her family’s legacy in the civil rights movement fits perfectly with our theme, “Equality and Justice for All.”
The 2023 SHORE Dinner will be held on Sunday, Oct. 22
2 PM Reception followed by Dinner at 3 PM
Dinner tickets are $90 per person for both dinner and reception, $65 for dinner only, or $25 for the reception only.
Mary C. Canty Recreation Center
971 Canal Street
Myrtle Beach, SC
»Google Map
Linton-Pryor urged HCDP members and supporters to make their reservations immediately for the SHORE Dinner, our party’s major fundraising event for the year. The deadline for submitting program ads is Saturday, October, 7.
Full-page, half-page, and business card-size ads are available.
Program ads are:
- Full page – $125
- Half Page – $75
- Business Card – $25
- Patron’s List (two line max) – $10
- Premium Pages – $250 each (1 Center and Inside Back Cover still available)
“HCDP is working hard to elect Democrats to public office and represent the people’s interests on the important social issues of our times—which, of course—include equality and justice for all!,” said Linton-Pryor.
Those are not just empty words. Republicans here in South Carolina and across our nation are working to restrict individual rights, ban books, restrict abortions and LGBTQ+ rights, and deny climate change, so we must work harder than ever to engage, educate, energize to empower our grassroots voters and elect candidates who will fight back. So, please, support our efforts because our very freedoms are under attack.
The SHORE Dinner will include music by Tamir & Company, dancing, a book signing by our guest speaker, a Silent Auction with great gifts, and much more!
Questions? Call Nancy Anderson at (843)340-1595. Leave a message for a prompt call back. Nancy can also be reached at votedems@sccoast.net.
To purchase tickets or program advertising, please click here.
