Ron Washington, chairman of the Black Students Union at the University of Kansas, left, addresses a strike rally on campus in this file photo from December 1970, as an unidentified youth displays a sign in memory of Rick "Tiger" Dowdell. Dowdell was fatally shot while fleeing police on July 16, 1970.

Civil rights activist Rick “Tiger” Dowdell, who was killed by Lawrence police in July 1970, will be remembered Monday night at a historical event at the Lawrence Public Library.

Monday night’s event will recall Dowdell’s shooting — which took place in an alley near Ninth and Rhode Island streets and was later ruled justified — while touching on the many questions from that night that remain unanswered and drawing similarities between the events of 1970 and today, said Bill Tuttle, a Kansas University professor of American history and one of the speakers scheduled for the event.

“It’s an evening in which we can remember, but also talk about 2015, talk about Mother Emanuel AME Church, or that 12-year-old boy in Cleveland or Sandra Bland down in Texas who allegedly hung herself,” he said. “There are a certain number of similarities, a number of them being young black men being shot in the back of the head while running away.”

The event is sponsored by the Lawrence branch of the NAACP, KU’s Department of American Studies, the Langston Hughes Center at KU and the Lawrence Public Library.

The event is free and open to the public. It begins at 7 p.m. in the Lawrence Public Library’s auditorium, 707 Vermont St.