When academia meets activism: Harvard's color lines conference draws nearly 1,000 participants to share new insights, data on the nation's agenda on race

Black Issues in Higher Education, Sept 25, 2003 by Ronald Roach

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

Labor Day weekend is not the time of year one would expect hundreds of professors, graduate students and other education professionals to be encamped under a white tent at the Harvard University law school campus for an academic conference. Usually, summer s unofficial last weekend provides professors, graduate students and higher education officials a last-minute opportunity to prepare for the new academic year and to squeeze in a final summer outing.

Nonetheless, the "Color Lines Conference: Segregation and Integration in America's Present and Future," organized by Harvard's Civil Rights Project, played to nearly 1,000 conference attendees intent on hearing and questioning the latest academic research on racial inequality and social justice in American society. Over three days, attendees were treated to 120 research paper presentations along with plenary panel discussions and an address by Harvard president Dr. Lawrence Summers.

"I am here to tell you that after eight years in Washington, this kind of knowledge and this kind of consciousness changes our nation. That is why a conference like this is so profoundly important," Summers, the former secretary of the U.S. Department of Treasury, told attendees.

Launched in 1996, the Civil Rights Project conducts research and organizes events to promote understanding of and to highlight racial integration and equality in the United States. The Color Lines research papers offered "flesh data and insights" on "the growing complexity of our nation's racial makeup; evidence of persisting, even increasing, racial inequalities; and the simultaneous steady erosion of civil rights protections and guarantees in courts and legislatures," according to conference organizers. The conference registration exceeded its original goal of 1,000, resulting in 1,100 registrations, and generated roughly 550 research paper submissions, more than four times the number of papers for which the event had presentation slots, according to officials.

"This is more than doable the size of conferences we've had in the past. It allows us to take our work to a new level," says Harvard law school professor Christopher Edley, founding co-director of Harvard's Civil Rights Project and member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Harvard education school professor Dr. Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project, says that the recent challenges to and elimination of race-conscious admissions policies in higher education have helped revive the academic research agenda around race-based issues.

"We're seeing a tremendous resurgence of interest in the academy around issues of racial inequality. You had a great deal of research that came out of the 1960s and 1970s, but it died down in the 1980s," Orfield explained.

Among the myriad of studies, the Civil Rights Project in association with the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research at the State University of New York-Albany generated significant local media coverage with the release of a report documenting evidence of deep-seated segregation in Boston metropolitan area schools. Students in Boston public schools are mostly Black and Latino. In suburban areas, Black and Latino children are concentrated in predominantly blue-collar districts, such as Lowell and Lawrence, and the affluent suburban schools cue predominantly White, according to the report.

Other conference highlights included plenary sessions featuring Julian Bond, the chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Antonia Hernandez, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund (MALDEF); Charles Ogletree, Harvard law school's Jesse Climenko Professor of Law; and Dr. William Julius Wilson, the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at Harvard.

Conference organizers, clearly buoyed by the turnout and an overwhelming response of submitted papers, said they hope to find a way to link social justice-minded academics with activist initiatives. In addition to touting the attendance and research paper submissions, Edley announced that corporate awards of $500,000, $200,000 and $100,000 came from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Delta Airlines respectively to help underwrite the conference.

"It's exceptionally difficult to have a conference of this sort" without corporate assistance, according to Edley.

In addition to the Civil Rights Project, other academic sponsors included the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard, Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard's Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program, the Harvard Immigration Project and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.

THE NOTABLES

During plenary sessions that featured panels of well-known scholars and activists, moderators posed provocative questions to respective panel members. When asked what is the most significant issue the civil rights community will confront in the 21st century, MALDEF's Hernandez told the conference audience that securing equality and fairness for a diverse, multiracial population ranked high among her concerns. "To me, the biggest challenge in civil rights is how we're going to deal with the demographic changes in this country," she said, referring to the nation's growing diversity fueled largely by immigration.