April 19, 2004

Talk marks five decades of ‘Brown v. Board’

On May 17, 1954, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine of school segregation in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education. At 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, May 5, in the University Union Ballroom at California State University, Sacramento, esteemed racial justice expert Christopher Edley, Jr., recently named dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, will discuss the effects of the decision five decades hence in his talk “Brown v. Board: 50 Years Later.”

Christopher Edley, Jr.

A Harvard Law School professor since 1981, Edley helped create The Civil Rights Project at Harvard to focus attention on current issues of racial justice. He is currently serving a six-year term as a member of the bipartisan U.S. Civil Rights Commission, is a member of the Task Force of the Common School exploring racial and economic segregation in public schools and has served on the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, a blue-ribbon group led by former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

Edley formerly served as special councel to President Bill Clinton and as director of the White House Review of Affirmative Action. From those experiences, he wrote his book Not All Black & White: Affirmative Action, Race and American Values, and is now working on a new book on the Clinton administration’s record on racial justice that also analyzes the future prospects of the racial justice movement in a multiracial society.

The lecture is sponsored by the College of Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies. For more information, call (916) 278-6156. For media assistance, contact CSUS public affairs at (916) 278-6156.

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