Some powerful figures in black America discussed issues concerning the black community during the one-day Emerging Black Leaders Symposium (EBLS), held in Cabot Auditorium on Saturday, Feb. 4.
Under the theme "Remembrance, Respect, and Responsibility," the second-annual symposium included panels on politics, arts and entertainment, the media and the idea of "the black family."
Two high-profile political figures, Massachusetts Gubernatorial Candidate Deval Patrick and U.S. Representative for Tennessee, Harold Ford Jr., also delivered addresses.
Central to the symposium was the audience's potential to assume leadership roles. Symposium organizer junior Mitch Robinson asked audience members to take a look at those sitting next to them, for "these are the people that will be not just emerging black leaders, but emerging leaders."
Though EBLS' name implies a focus on black youth, the symposium aimed for a broader perspective. "There's no such thing as a black issue," Robinson said. "They are our nation's issues."
Ford, currently serving his fifth term as a U.S. representative of Tennessee, delivered the keynote address.
While emphasizing the strength of the American system of government, he stated that the current political situation is under fire.
"If there was ever a time for people to be engaged and activist, now is that time," Ford said. According to Ford, with only 94 days of work per year, Congress is not spending enough time on the job. Ford cited Congress' treatment of the Iraq war as an example of the muddled state of current politics. He explained that foreign policy issues are worth discussing at a black symposium, because "black people don't want to be blown up either."
Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha's call for the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq in November was, according to Ford, "the first time of an honest and intentional discussion about Iraq in Congress."
"We're not debating the issues we should be," Ford said.
Ford argued that younger generations, regardless of race, should be more aware of global events and cultures. "We've got to understand the world better than our previous generations," he said. "The world, as we all here know, is smaller than it has ever been."
The panels of the symposium, however, turned attention to domestic issues. The politics panel focused on the black empowerment movement, which panelists described as increasingly stagnant, even with more black leaders in the political sphere.
"We have this entrenched class divide," Kennedy School of Government professor Kim Williams said. According to Williams, one goal should be improving relations between middle and lower class blacks.
"Without mobilizing the black corps, who is going to hold the political leadership accountable?" Williams asked.
Massachusetts State Representative Gloria Fox urged different communities to think of themselves collectively as one. "Our struggle in Roxbury is the same as yours in Dorchester," she said.
Yet Williams also said that the black community is, and should be, diverse. "There is a unified front working for the suppression of difference," she said.
Massachusetts Gubernatorial Candidate Patrick, the symposium's opening speaker, agreed with Williams. "We have got to get past these politics where we have to agree on everything to work on anything," he said. "Don't let us be put in a box."
Patrick, in his opening speech, emphasized another key theme of the symposium, social justice, which he called the "real moral question of our time."
History professor Gerald Gill was the sole panelist representing Tufts. Gill spoke as part of the final panel, which discussed how it came to be that black families have been put into a cycle in which, due to their being products of a broken home, it's difficult for family members to foster a more self-sufficient home environment.
