Boulder – The Rev. Al Sharpton challenged University of Colorado students to fight racism on campus and push school officials to create more opportunities for students of color.
“You cannot act as if there’s nothing that can be done,” he said Monday. “You cannot sit back and allow any incident of racism to go unchallenged.”
More than 1,000 students and residents packed CU’s Glenn Miller Ballroom to capacity to hear Sharpton, the New York-based founder of the National Action Network and a prominent voice on race and diversity issues. Shortly before the speech, organizers had to close the doors and direct the overflow to a dining room, where the speech was piped in.
Sharpton rewarded the crowd with a fiery speech in his characteristically punctuated cadence on topics such as the legacies of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, the Iraq war, the president’s response to Hurricane Katrina and affirmative action.
The crowd was overwhelmingly friendly, and he brought some of the loudest applause when he criticized President Bush.
“It seems to me very frightening that we have a president who could see weapons in Iraq that were not there but could not see a hurricane in New Orleans that was there,” Sharpton said.
But the real purpose of Sharpton’s speech was to speak on discrimination and racial inequity. The CU campus has been embroiled in these issues after incidents of racial intimidation and the possibly racially motivated attack on a black student, as well as a growing concern over the low number of minority students on campus.
Sharpton told the crowd that institutionalized racism is a greater threat than overt racism, and he said he backs affirmative action to boost diversity.
“The reason why government must do what it can to correct a gap is because government helped cause the gap,” he said.
Student leaders must open a dialogue about racism, meet with university officials and set firm goals they want to reach, Sharpton said. They must not get discouraged easily.
Mebraht Gebre-Michael, one of three leaders of CU’s student government and a member of the university’s blue-ribbon commission trying to improve campus diversity, said the speech – while not addressing specifics at CU – was encouraging.
“His words really do inspire me to know that it is a small number of individuals who are committed who can make the change,” she said.
Prior to the speech, a group of students called the RISEUP Coalition carried signs outside the ballroom that sought concrete promises from university officials to improve diversity. Civil engineering graduate student Tim Hillman held a sign that read, “Out of 24,710 students only 394 black?”
“We believe that diversity issues and hate crimes around the community are very serious things,” he said. “And we want the university administration to do something about it.”
Staff writer John Ingold can be reached at 720-929-0898 or jingold@denverpost.com
