The halls of Harvard Law School were unusually busy Labor Day weekend as more than 1,000 activists and academics made their way to Cambridge to debate segregation’s present and future in America.

The four-day Color Lines Conference, organized by Harvard’s Civil Rights Project (CRP), was packed with high-profile events, including a speech by a top official from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the presentation of a major study revealing unusually high segregation in Boston-area neighborhoods and elementary schools. University President Lawrence H. Summers was a late addition to the list of speakers (please see related story at right).

Fifty-six panels scrutinized racial and ethnic inequalities in areas including education, health care, housing and the workforce, heatedly debating the best ways to address these problems.

In a press conference last Monday, John Logan of the University of Albany presented the results of a study he led which found that minority children in greater Boston generally live and learn apart from their white counterparts, in statistically poorer settings—and that the inequalities had sharpened in the last 10 years.

“Separate but equal would look like a step forward,” Logan quipped in reference to the long-discarded 1896 Supreme Court rationale for segregating schools and public facilities.

The study is the first in a series of several planned to be publicized through the CRP.

Gary A. Orfield, the CRP’s co-director, said that some participants were calling the weekend’s lively mix of research and realism, speech-making and sociology, “the Woodstock of academic conferences.”

Orfield said that walking through the Law School as it was temporarily occupied by hundreds of people sharing little more than the expertise and desire to discuss fundamental issues of race relations, he was reminded of the Supreme Court’s June ruling that the value of diversity justifies the consideration of race in higher education admissions.

“This whole conference was designed to be very intentionally multiracial,” he said. “It was a kind of a living illustration of the power of what [Justice Sandra Day O’Connor] talked about” in that decision.

Andrew Grant-Thomas, the conference’s director, joined Orfield in lauding the differences among the participants—ideological as well as ethnic.

“Those of us who do this work within academia and outside academia have a tendency to think we have it all worked out,” Grant-Thomas said. “It’s good to meet people with equally strong convictions.”

NAACP Board Chair Julian Bond was watched with rapt attention when he spoke to a packed audience over dinner on Aug. 30.

Bond celebrated the advances of the last half-century even as he deplored what he said was a current tendency among leaders to neglect the ongoing fight for racial equality.

“One of the political parties is spineless and the other is shameless,” he said.

Bond said that activists relied on academic work to give their vision substance.