Program Encourages New Civil Rights Leaders

Amid a rising wave of campus activism, 21 students from across the country are spending this summer in Cambridge and Washington D.C., learning how to organize and fight for civil rights as part of a Harvard-sponsored fellowship.

Civil Rights Summer (CRS), now in its first summer, seeks to provide an “in-depth academic study and social history” to support the next generation of Civil Rights leaders, according to CRS Director Andra Rose.

The program grew out of an identified need to encourage social activists and train students to take action, according to program officials.

“We may be training the next Martin Luther King, Jr. or Cesar Chavez,” said Gary Orfield, co-director of Harvard’s Civil Rights Project, one of the three programs sponsoring CRS. The other two sponsors are the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

Since the program is brand new this year, officials said they had hoped it would draw 300 applications. However, thanks mostly to Internet distribution, more than 1300 students applied. Because of the overwhelming demand for the spots, the staff hopes to expand the program in future years—perhaps boosting the program next summer to 30 students if funding comes through.

After selecting the candidates, CRS staff worked with a coalition of 180 civil rights groups to place the students in internships. Organizations in which students were placed this year included the NAACP, the AFL-CIO and the National Education Association (NEA).

Students began their summer with a week-long seminar on the Harvard campus, where they heard from a “daily overload” of four or five speakers, many of whom spoke about their personal involvement in the Civil Rights movement, according to participant Najiba Akbar, a rising junior at Wellesley College.

The speakers taught students about the history of the Civil Rights movement, local and national organizing strategies and about modern mass movements.

“They were really able to convey their passion to us,” Akbar said.

Throughout the summer, CRS students also have weekly dinner discussions with newsmakers on Tuesdays and other panel discussions on Fridays—including an upcoming meeting with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy ’54-’56 (D.-Mass.).The group has met with activists and government leaders on the local, state and national level.

“We’re seeing people operating on all different levels,” Akbar says.

The program seeks to expose students to many different aspects of civil rights law and social justice, including the American Indian rights movement, immigration issues, affirmative action and educational equity movements.

“We want people to be able to identify with at least one speaker over the summer and say ‘Hey, I could do that,’” Rose says.

Akbar, who is active in Wellesley’s Muslim Students’ Association, is working in the AFL-CIO’s Civil Rights Division, where she is working on election reform issues in the wake of the disputed presidential election last fall.

The only Harvard student to participate this summer, Fred O. Smith ’04 who serves as political director for Harvard’s Black Students’ Association, was placed by CRS at the NEA after expressing an interest in education.

Smith spends his days at the NEA poring over research about state educational achievement testing, like Massachusetts’ MCAS tests or the New York Regents exams and working to ensure educational equity.

While he loves the internship, Smith says that much of the strength of the program comes from the other students and spending time with “20 other people interested in social justice issues.”

“A lot of the learning we’ve been doing is learning from each other,” Akbar said. “It’s been really thought provoking, learning strategies for fighting injustice.”

The program is funded largely through a grant by the Ford Foundation with additional help from the Texaco Corporation.

CRS covers all of the students’ housing expenses, transportation to and from Washington and provides a small weekly stipend to cover food expenses. At the end of the summer, the students are given a $1500 scholarship to cover “what they might have made in a regular job,” Rose says.

“I can’t imagine doing anything better this summer,” Smith says.

—Staff writer Garrett M. Graff can be reached at ggraff@fas.harvard.edu.