Students to rally at U-M Students to rally at U-M
Supreme Court's affirmative action ruling has college activists flocking to Ann Arbor
The Detroit News
ANN ARBOR -- Several hundred student activists will converge this weekend on the University of Michigan, hoping to give birth to a new era of student activism at the epicenter of the national debate on affirmative action.
In the wake of a favorable U.S. Supreme Court decision on affirmative action this week, students from 38 college campuses and at least a dozen high schools will gather Friday through Sunday for the National Student-Youth Conference to Defend Affirmative Action & Integration and Struggle for Equality.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson is the scheduled speaker for a noon rally Friday, with the remainder of the weekend devoted to impromptu workshops where participants will map out ways to fight for what they believe. The event is being organized by the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action & Integration, and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary and by Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.
"From here, the new civil rights movement is going to move to the offensive," said Hoku Jeffrey, a senior from the University of California in Berkeley and one of the conference organizers.
The lengthy name of the conference mirrors the wide range of issues the student leaders want addressed, from creating diverse student populations to equitable pay for campus workers -- all issues that have spurred a rise this spring in campus activism some say not seen since the anti-apartheid protests of the mid-1980s.
"The aim of the conference is to have open and democratic debate ... on the prospects of the movement we're organizing, and to have it move forward," said Ben Royal, a U-M junior from Detroit and one of the conference organizers.
Ann Arbor was chosen as the gathering place for the new movement after a federal judge in March ruled against U-M Law School's admissions policy, which grants an advantage based on race, Royal said. That case, along with another against the university's undergraduate admissions, are pending in a federal appeals court, most likely on their way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
After that initial disappointment, there have been recent victories the organizers said will spur them on: a decision May 15 by the University of California regents to end their ban on race-based admissions, and the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling Tuesday not to take up a case in which a lower court upheld the University of Washington law school's affirmative-action admissions policy. That leaves the U-M cases as the next likely target for Supreme Court review.
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