"If we believe that an integrated society is right and it's not negotiable, then we have to go for it," Baye said to applause and cheers from the audience.

Blacks must continue to lead the discussion the way they led the Civil Rights movement, Divguid said, adding that Clinton may have been advised to avoid addressing race by whites who see it as too divisive an issue.

Ogletree suggested that perhaps Clinton is the multicultural president, positioning himself to speak for minority groups other than blacks.

But some panelists pointed out that they are not expecting the President to be responsible for magically changing ingrained racial prejudices and that he has not totally neglected the needs of the black community.

Sheryl McCarthy, also a columnist for Newsday, said she was "impressed by the President's initiative to put aside 15 million dollars to give to non-profits to fight housing discrimination."

However, she also criticized him for glossing over the issue of race by appointing a panel to study the problems faced by blacks.

When people "don't really want to do anything serious [they] appoint a commission to study the problem," McCarthy said.

The panel is part of the three day meeting of the Trotter Group, which is an annual meeting of American black columnists.

The first Trotter Group meeting was held at Harvard in 1992 after several black columnists noticed a conspicuous lack of black writers of commentary pieces in American newspapers, according to Payne, a who was a Trotter Group founder.

Since its first meeting, the Trotter group has convened three times at other institutions. Half of the group met with President Clinton in the fall of 1996, and the other half early in 1997 to advise him on his racial agenda.

William Monroe Trotter, a Harvard alumni was the first black American Phi Beta Kappa. During his career as a journalist, Trotter brought the racial debate to the front page of American newspapers, according to literature distributed at the forum.

"We refuse to allow the impression that to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults," Trotter wrote with W.B. DuBois in the Declaration of Principles for the Niagara Movement.

The Trotter Group was established to preserve Trotter's legacy of protest.