Final Word

“We want people to walk the picket lines free and unafraid and know that they are working for their
freedom and their liberty.”

In a speech titled “Science, Edu-cation and Democracy,” delivered at the 1913 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Atlanta and published a month later in Science magazine, J. McKeen Cattell, owner and editor of Science, declared —while arguing for educational opportunities for Blacks — that “There is not a single mulatto who has done creditable scientific work.”

I have always entertained a high regard for the gentleman from New York, because I believed him to be a useful member of the House. He is a gentleman of talent and of fine education, and I have thought heretofore that he would certainly be charitable toward a race of people who have never enjoyed the same advantages that he has.

The Oct. 18 issue of The Chronicle of Philanthropy confirmed what we in the nonprofit sector already knew: The nonprofit and philanthropic sector doesn’t do a very good job at this thing called diversity.

In 1925, as I was graduating from elementary school in the eighth grade in Rankin, which is a little borough of Pittsburgh, a Croatian student and I who were planning the class activities realized that there were 57 of us and at that time, there were the Heinz 57 varieties.

We are waging a war here. Like any major military campaign, we need the attack power of many different armies. Clearly, our voices grow louder and our messages intensify when we work together, not apart in this common cause. This global partnership that is the World Summit Against Cancer is a perfect example of uniting our efforts and integrating our knowledge.

In his welcome and inspiring maiden statement to the General Assembly, President Barack Obama correctly identified the challenges to our multilateral unity as “rooted in a discontent with the status quo.” We wholeheartedly endorse this assessment.

Those who say that “race is history” have it exactly backward — history is race. America, scrambled, after all, spells “I am race.” And America is race — from its symbolism to its substance, from its founding by slaveholders to its rending by civil war, from Johnnie Reb to Jim Crow, from the Ku Klux Klan to Katrina.