Panelists
Taylor
Branch is the premier chronicler of the Civil Rights Era
in America. The first volume of his epic history, Parting the
Waters, America in the King Years, 1954-63, was published in
1988 and won the Pulitzer Prize. His second volume, Pillar of
Fire, covers barely more than two years, 1963-65. Together they
run to more than 1500 pages. He is currently at work on the third
and final volume due to be published early in 2006. A magisterial
storyteller, Branch’s history ranges confidently over the highs
and lows of the civil rights movement. But he also stops repeatedly
along the way to explore the seemingly less significant tales of ordinary
people – farmers and teachers, sharecroppers and schoolchildren,
dentists and cab drivers, prying their freedom loose from the grip
of segregationist whites – and in so doing overcoming the racist
restrictions that had always made the achievements of American democracy
ring hollow.
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Roger
Clegg is Vice President and General Counsel of the Center
for Equal Opportunity, a conservative research and educational organization
based in Sterling, Virginia, that specializes in civil rights, immigration,
and bilingual education issues. Mr. Clegg also is a contributing editor
at National Review Online, and writes frequently for USA
Today, The Weekly Standard, The Legal Times, The Chronicle of Higher
Education, and other popular periodicals and law journals. From
1982 to 1993, he held a number of positions at the U.S. Department
of Justice, including Assistant to the Solicitor General, where he
argued three cases before the United States Supreme Court, and the
number-two official in the Civil Rights Division and Environment Division.
From 1993 to 1997, Mr. Clegg was vice president and general counsel
of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest, where he wrote
and edited a variety of publications on legal issues of interest to
business. He is a graduate of Rice University and Yale Law School.
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Wade
Henderson is executive director of the Leadership Conference
on Civil Rights and Counselor to the Leadership Conference on Civil
Rights Education Fund. The Leadership Conference is the nation’s
premier civil and human rights coalition with 200 national groups
working together to advance common goals of equal opportunity for
all Americans. The LCCR is at the forefront of some the nation’s
most intense policy battles—the struggle over judicial appointments;
the fight over social security privatization; and preparation for
the reauthorization of provisions of the Voting Rights Act—among
others. Mr. Henderson, a graduate of Howard University and the Rutgers
University School of Law (Newark), previously served as Washington
bureau director of the NAACP and associate director of the Washington
national office of the American Civil Liberties Union. He is also
the Joseph L. Rauh Professor of Public Interest Law at the University
of the District of Columbia.
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Alexander
Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling, Jr. Professor of History
and Social Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of
Government. An historian by training, he has specialized in the excavation
of issues that have contemporary policy implications. His 1986 book,
Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts,
was awarded three scholarly prizes. His most recent book, The
Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States
(2000), received the Eugene Genovese Prize from The Historical
Society, given bi-annually, for the best book in U.S. history published
in the preceding two years, and the Beveridge Award from the American
Historical Association for best English-language book on American
history and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Los Angeles
Times Book Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize. Keyssar’s
current research interests include election reform, the history of
democracies, and the history of poverty.
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John
Lewis has served as U.S. Representative of Georgia’s
Fifth Congressional District since 1986. Lewis was born the son of
sharecroppers in rural Alabama. He grew up on his family’s farm
and attended segregated public schools in Pike County, Alabama. As
a student at Fisk University, John Lewis organized sit-in demonstrations
at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1961, he
volunteered to participate in the Freedom Rides, which challenged
segregation at interstate bus terminals across the South. Lewis risked
his life on those Rides many times by simply sitting in seats reserved
for white patrons. During the height of the Civil Rights Movement,
from 1963 to 1966, Lewis was named Chairman of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he helped form. While still a
young man, he was dubbed one of the Big Six leaders of the Civil Rights
Movement. (The others were Whitney Young, A. Phillip Randolph, Martin
Luther King Jr., James Farmer and Roy Wilkins). At the age of 23,
he was an architect of and a keynote speaker at the historic March
on Washington in August 1963. In 1964, he coordinated SNCC efforts
to organize voter registration drives and community action programs
during the Mississippi Freedom Summer. The following year, Lewis helped
spearhead one of the most seminal moments of the Civil Rights Movement
when he and Hosea Williams led over 600 peaceful, orderly protestors
across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965.
They intended to march from Selma to Montgomery to demonstrate the
need for voting rights in the state. The marchers were attacked by
Alabama state troopers in a brutal confrontation that became known
as “Bloody Sunday.” News broadcasts and photographs revealing
the cruelty of the segregated South helped hasten the passage of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. John Lewis published his biography (with
writer Michael D'Orso), entitled Walking With The Wind: A Memoir
of the Movement, in 1998.
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Abigail
Thernstrom is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute
in New York, a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education,
and the vice-chair of the US Commission on Civil Rights. Thernstrom
and her husband, Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom, are the co-authors
of America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, which
the New York Times Book Review named as one of the notable
books of 1997. Their latest book, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap
in Learning, was published by Simon & Schuster in October 2003.
They are also the editors of Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives
on Race and Ethnicity. Thernstrom’s 1987 work, Whose Votes
Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights won numerous
awards and was named the best policy studies book of that year by
the Policy Studies Organization (an affiliate of the American Political
Science Association).
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Patricia
J. Williams, is Professor of Law at Columbia University and
a columnist for The Nation magazine. A member of the State Bar of
California and the Federal Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, Williams
has served on the advisory council for the Medgar Evers Center for
Law and Social Justice of the City University of New York and on the
board of governors for the Society of American Law Teachers, among
others. Her publications include Anthony Burns: The Defeat and
Triumph of a Fugitive Slave, On Being the Object of Property,
and The Electronic Transformation of Law. In 1993, Harvard
University Press published Williams’s The Alchemy of Race
& Rights to widespread critical acclaim. She is also author
of Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race. Born
in Boston and educated at Wellesley College and Harvard Law School,
Williams received a MacArthur “genius” award in 2000.
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Harris
Wofford graduated from the University of Chicago and from
Howard University and Yale Law Schools. In 1958 he became the legal
assistant to Rev. Theodore Hesburgh on the first term of the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights and then became an associate professor
at Notre Dame Law School. In the 1950s on many occasions he worked
as a volunteer with Martin Luther King who said he was the only lawyer
who would help him go to jail instead of using the tricks of the trade
to keep him out. In John Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign, Wofford
organized the civil rights section, and in 1961 became special assistant
to the President for civil rights and chaired the Subcabinet Group
on Civil Rights. In late 1962 with his family he went to Ethiopia
to head the Peace Corps there and serve as special representative
to Africa, returning in 1964 to become Peace Corps associate director.
In the late 1960s he was the founding president of the State University
of New York College at Old Westbury, and then in the l970s served
as president of Bryn Mawr College. His book, Of Kennedys and Kings:
Making Sense of the Sixties was published in 1980. In May 1991 he was appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Senator John Heinz, and won an upset victory over Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. After his 1994 defeat by Rick Santorum, Wofford became the CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and led AmeriCorps' growth to 50,000 members. In 2001-2004 he served as chair of America's Promise: the Alliance for Youth. He is now writing a book on his adventures over seven decades.
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Alan
Wolfe is Professor of Political Science and Director of the
Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.
His most recent books include Return to Greatness: How America
Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What it Needs to Do to Recover It
(2005), The Transformation of American Religion: How We actually
Practice our Faith (2003), and An Intellectual in Public
(2003). He is the author or editor of more than ten other books including
Marginalized in the Middle (1997), One Nation, After
All (1998), Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World
of Choice (2001) and School Choice: The Moral Debate
(editor, 2002). Both One Nation, After All and Moral
Freedom were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the
Year. A contributing editor of The New Republic and The Wilson Quarterly,
Professor Wolfe writes often for those publications as well as for
Commonweal, The New York Times, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly,
The Washington Post, and other magazines and newspapers. He served
as an advisor to President Clinton in preparation for his 1995 State
of the Union address and has lectured widely at American and European
universities.
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