On September 19–21, 2024, CIC hosted a conference on Independent Colleges and the Legacies of Slavery at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN. The museum is on the site of the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Today, on the national holiday that honors King’s memory, we are pleased to look back and share a video snapshot of the conference.
The conference was the culmination of CIC’s multiyear initiative, Legacies of American Slavery: Reckoning with the Past—which you can learn more about right here at legaciesofslavery.net. The gathering was an opportunity to celebrate the important work already supported through the initiative while exploring the unfinished work that independent colleges still must do reckon with and repair the legacies of slavery.
“The realist in race relations trying to answer the question of progress would seek to combine the trues of two opposites…. [T]he realist would agree with the optimist that we have come a long, long way, but he would seek to balance that by agreeing with the pessimist in that we have a long, long way to go. And it is this realistic position that I would like to take as a basis for our thinking together … as we deal with the question of progress in race relations, and as we deal with the whole question of the future of integration. We have come a long, long way, but we have a long, long way to go before the problem is solved.”
— MLK at Illinois Wesleyan University, February 1966 (source)