“We need you,” he said. “We need to be able to say with conviction things we know are true.”
Antonia Hernandez, the president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, sat next to Bond as she said that grassroots activism was no less important in making the Supreme Court’s decision a reality.
“It’s just a piece of paper if it isn’t coming from the ground up,” she said.
Grant-Thomas said that a number of factors had combined to make the time right for such a comprehensive gathering.
“We live in a time of extreme demographic change,” he said, citing the most recent census data. At the same time, he said, “racial inequalities don’t go away inevitably or without a lot of effort.”
The conference’s organizers said this had led to profound soul-searching in the civil rights movement.
“The concepts and terms being used were obsolete and didn’t fit a radically transformed society,” Orfield said.
“Thirty-five to 40 years ago there was a consensus among ‘right-thinking people’ that integration was good,” said Grant-Thomas, explaining that this certainty had given way over time to unanswered questions: “Is the integration ideal something we want, we still aspire to?”
Both said the conference’s planning had also fortuitously coincided with a huge outpouring of new segregation research occasioned by the University of Michigan’s affirmative action cases.
“We were really near the epicenter of all that,” Orfield said. “That was one of the things that really woke people in the academic world up.”
Orfield also cited the upcoming anniversary of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling against segregation, Brown v. Board of Education—and the 2004 elections.
“We’re coming up on an election that’s probably going to decide the future of the Supreme Court,” he said.
As a result, Orfield said the CRP had been hit with “a tidal wave of proposals” when it opened its call for papers last year.
Grant-Thomas said that out of 600 proposals it received, the CRP had gleaned 100 to come to the conference, and had then recruited 150 more on its own.
“Obviously we’re tapping into a hunger for thinking of where the country is going,” Orfield said.
He said that in scheduling the conference, the CRP had encountered another pleasant surprise.
“When we realized we could only get enough space at Harvard over the Labor Day weekend, we thought, ‘Who is going to come?’” he said.
In fact, Orfield said that the conference had ultimately had to turn away some attendees because of the huge response.
—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.