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The Color Lines Conference, held over three
and a half days on Labor Day Weekend, featured three plenary
sessions, 52 panels, and 250 speakers on themes ranging from
electoral politics to religious diversity; educational and
residential segregation to criminal justice; and race and
ethnicity in the law to racial disparities in health outcomes.
The panel and plenary speakers and the 1100-plus conference
participants represented a rich variety of academic disciplines
and professional sectors. Their passion, intellectual energy,
and wide-ranging backgrounds and expertise made for vigorous,
challenging, and constructive exchanges throughout the weekend.
The feedback we have received thus far on the
conference has been extremely favorable. And if there is one
main thrust to what conference participants’ have had
to say, it is that our work to enrich and reframe discussions
and policymaking around race and integration has only begun.
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President Lawrence
Summers speaking during the Color Lines Conference |
"Thank you Gary and Chris and thanks to
the people at The Harvard Civil Rights Project, and thank
everybody here for their participation in this remarkable
event.”
“We have many academic conferences in a year at Harvard,
we have very few that have 1,100 registrants and we have very,
very few in which 550 research groups seek a chance to present
their work. And, the magnitude of this conference is a reflection
of the tremendous importance of the issues that you are addressing.”
“… That is why the work of The Civil Rights Rights
Project, which assures that there is an ever-growing quantum
of information, of analysis, of evaluation, on this important
problem is so terribly, terribly important. You can see it
in the research that lay behind the Great Society. You can
see it in the research that is cited in the Court’s
opinion in the Michigan case. And, you can see it, too, in
the fact that it has been research that has been cited on
those occasions when efforts have been made to take our country
backwards on these very important issues.”
“I am so glad that with Chris and Gary’s leadership,
The Harvard Civil Rights Project is helping Harvard to make
as great a contribution as it can to so profoundly important
a challenge for our nation.”
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Dean
Kagan of Harvard Law School |
“As you walk around here … people are talking
about the most exciting range of things all having to do with
… the most critical issues on the nation’s agenda,
which is the future of civil rights. You walk into one place
and you hear talk about regression analyses, then you hear
talk about community organizing strategies, and what’s
so great about this conference is that all these people are
talking together, are exchanging views, are pooling knowledge
and information, and are really advancing the agenda here
at Harvard.”
“What this conference shows is how academics can engage
with the real world. And, quite honestly we need to be shown
that. Law Schools need to be shown that. All parts of the
University need to be shown that. We too much sort of focus
on ourselves, we too much isolate ourselves from the community
and the nation and the world in which we live. And, The Civil
Rights Project that Gary and Chris have run over these past
years does the exact opposite. What they show - is they show
all of us how to build bridges; they show all of us how the
scholarly community can connect with the policy community
with the practice community with the advocacy community and
how those connections can make a difference; how those connections
can improve people’s lives; how those connections can
better the world in which we live. And, so they are a great
model for us here at the Law School.”
“This conference is really extraordinary!”
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