The National Student/Youth Conference to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration and Struggle for Equality was held at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor. The 200 people in attendance were joined for the June 1 session by 200 students who came on buses from high schools in Detroit and Ann Arbor. The session was devoted to struggles of high school students. About a dozen of the students stayed through the end of the conference.

A fight to defend the affirmative action admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School gained national attention last year after students organized several rallies on campus. In March, a U.S. district judge ruled against affirmative action at the school, but protests help force a temporary stay on implementing this ruling until an appeal by the university is heard by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati this October.

The conference drew participation of 30 students from Penn State University who had organized protests demanding the university investigate racist attacks and death threats against Black student leaders and protect those being threatened. The students were leaders of a campaign to demand more funding for African and African American studies programs.

Several activists attended from the University of California at Berkeley, where the Board of Regents recently decided to lift its 1995 ban on affirmative action in admissions. Students active in a campaign for a "living wage" for workers at Harvard, and in affirmative action struggles at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the University of Florida in Tampa also attended. There were also students from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and Colorado State University in Denver.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home