The University has hosted prominent activists from across fields.
For decades, the University of Rochester has brought leading civil rights proponents to campus.
All came with a message advancing social justice and more recently, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Just as important, says Norman Burnett, assistant dean and director of the Office of Minority Student Affairs (OMSA), they’ve come from an exceptionally wide orbit. They’ve ranged from actors, athletes, activists, and authors, to poets, politicians, jurists, and scholars. “It’s important that our students were and are exposed to a wide range of speakers,” says Burnett, who has served in his leadership role at OMSA since 1997. “The diversity of speakers remains necessary as they continue to remind us that bias, racism, and discrimination continue to permeate too many aspects of society at home and abroad.”
In celebration of Black History Month, here are profiles of some of the speakers who have visited the River Campus—and their timely messages.
Photos from University Archives, unless otherwise credited.
Thurgood Marshall
April 20, 1961
The future Supreme Court justice was special counsel to the NAACP when he visited the River Campus to present a lecture titled “Racial Tensions: Problems and Prospects.” He argued (using the customary language of the day) that “the Negro of the South is not the United States’ problem or the world’s problem, but the problem of each individual. When this is realized, the civil rights problem will be solved.”
Six years later, Marshall became the Supreme Court’s first Black justice after being nominated by President Lyndon Johnson. He served until 1991, when he retired due to health issues and was replaced by Clarence Thomas.
John Lewis
March 11, 1964
Before he became a towering figure in Congress, serving Georgia for more than three decades, Lewis was national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Only 23 when he came to speak on the River Campus, his talk before about 250 University students had a tone of “impatience and immediacy of the Civil Rights movement,” according to the Campus Times. Lewis, who had spoken at the March on Washington the previous summer, told the Rochester crowd: “Negroes have been waiting for over 100 years for this country to justify itself, and they’re tired of waiting. Throughout the country, the Negro is crying out, ‘I want to be free—now!”
Robert Kennedy
October 1, 1964
Kennedy was running for the Senate, representing New York, when he spoke at Strong Auditorium on a campaign stop. It was less than a year since his brother, President John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated and one month since Robert had resigned as attorney general.
Asked about civil rights legislation, Kennedy said improvements in education for Black children—then, as now, disproportionately underserved—would be crucial. “All of us who have an education have a special responsibility,” he said. “If John F. Kennedy’s life stands for anything, it stands for the idea that an individual can make a difference and should try.”
As a senator, Kennedy supported the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and traveled the country to speak about race and poverty. On April 4, 1968, Kennedy announced the death of Martin Luther King Jr. to a mostly Black crowd in Indianapolis. His impromptu speech that night is considered one of the most memorable addresses in American history. Two months later, he, too, would be assassinated.
Benjamin Quarles
February 16, 1967
Early in 1967, the University commemorated the 150th anniversary of the birth of social reformer, abolitionist, and longtime Rochester resident Frederick Douglass by hosting a series of lectures dedicated to the 19th-century icon. The first of eight speakers was historian and author Benjamin Quarles, who gave an extensive overview of Douglass’s life.
“He did hold that the Negro’s white friends could not do for him what he could do for himself,” Quarles said of Douglass. “The Negro should be his own man.”
Quarles would write 10 books, including two on Douglass, before his death in 1996. Many of his books explored the contributions made by Black soldiers and abolitionists during the Revolutionary War and Civil War.
Muhammad Ali
May 17, 1971
The boxing icon had been stripped of his heavyweight title and was facing imprisonment after refusing induction into the US Army during the Vietnam War. He spoke before a packed Alexander Palestra just months after losing an epic championship match to Joe Frazier.
The Campus Times called Ali “a poet, dramatist, Black philosopher, comic, and Muslim.” Ali stated that he was proud to be Black.
Six weeks after his Rochester appearance, the Supreme Court would overturn Ali’s conviction unanimously. He would reclaim the heavyweight champion twice more and be widely considered the greatest boxer of all time.
(University of Rochester photo / Scott Brande ’72)
Barbara Jordan
April 12, 1974
Jordan was the first Black person elected to the Texas Senate since Reconstruction and the first from a southern state elected to the US House of Representatives, where she served from 1973 to 1979.
Her talk at Rochester was sponsored by the University’s Afro-American Lecture Series.
A decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the civil rights movement remained a strong force, she told audience members. “Black America has gone political,” she declared. “It has seized every opportunity, as though it were the last chance for survival.”
She also cautioned Black Americans against the temptation of separatism. “Our problems are too big for isolationist or separatist politics,” she said. Citing poverty, for example, she told the audience its alleviation would demand congressional action.
Maya Angelou
February 15, 1985
The iconic poet and novelist appeared at Hubbell Auditorium as part of the University’s annual celebration of Black History Month. Richard Mitchell ’86, president of Black Students’ Union, told audience members that day, “the observation exists because African Americans have been historically excluded from our education and even derived as fact.”
Angelou said she supported Mitchell’s assertion and underscored it by pointing to many talented but relatively unknown Black poets, urging those in the audience to read their work.
Angelou had also come to campus for a lecture in 1973. She returned in 2003, speaking to a sold-out Palestra. Speaking of the university environment, she said: “In this place, you can lay your burden down—the burden of ignorance, the burden of racism, the burden or ageism, the burden of sexism. The truth is that it has been created so each of you can become a rainbow in the clouds for those to come. If you think of it that way, it makes your lessons, your homework, a little less tedious.”
Julian Bond
January 26, 2001
The civil rights pioneer was chairman of the NAACP when he delivered the University’s first Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Address at a packed Strong Auditorium.
Bond told audience members that popular culture has given Americans an inaccurate view of heroes like King, and people tend to honor him more for his commanding presence than for many of the things he stood for. For example, Bond said, King was a critic of what he saw as the evils of capitalism, and a pacifist “who equated apartheid in South Africa and South Alabama.”
People who like to quote King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, he concluded, tend to forget that it is “a dream that remains a dream today.”
Mary Frances Berry
April 1, 2002
Berry was the second speaker to deliver the University’s annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Address. Then chairwoman of the US Commission on Civil Rights, she gave a talk at the Interfaith Chapel called “Empowering the Dream,” reminding audience members that everyone must do their part to “break down barriers” and ensure that all have access to quality education and health care.
“Even as we cite gains for people of color in the worlds of entertainment, sports, and business, there are large numbers of people in this country who are still at the bottom,” Berry said.
The Nashville native had been appointed to the commission by President Carter early in 1980. When Ronald Reagan defeated Carter and was inaugurated in 1981, he attempted to remove Berry from her position. She took the president to court and won.
Jesse Jackson
February 13, 2007
Jackson has been a political activist since the 1960s and worked for Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Southern Leadership Conference in the mid-1960s. When King was assassinated at a Memphis motel in 1968, Jackson was in the parking lot one floor below.
Jackson’s talk at Strong Auditorium was titled “Linked Fate: Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere,” based on a quote from King.
“We must not just admire Dr. King, but we must follow,” Jackson told the audience at Strong Auditorium. “There is no struggle in admiration because it requires no action. We need to learn the value of living together.”
(University of Rochester photo / Richard Baker)
Nikki Giovanni
January 23, 2009
The world-renowned poet and activist spoke to a crowd at Strong Auditorium just three days after the historic presidential inauguration of Barack Obama. “It’s a new day for Black America,” Giovanni said. “Obama didn’t become president because he’s Black. He became president because he is a competent man.”
Giovanni credited the Pullman Porters, a group of Black railroad workers who formed the first Black labor union—the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. “Without the Pullman Porters, the Civil Rights Movement would not have been financed,” she said.
During her speech, she also championed civil rights for women and for the gay and lesbian communities, adding that she supported same-sex marriage.
“Civil rights are civil rights,” she said.
(University of Rochester photo / Brandon Vick)
Lani Guinier
April 12, 2013
Guinier was the first Black female tenured professor at Harvard Law School, and a prominent civil rights attorney. She came to public attention in 1993 when President Clinton nominated her to head the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice. After vehement political attacks concerning Guinier’s scholarly writings, which explored voting systems such as cumulative voting, used on some corporate boards and school boards, as a means to protecting the political power of minority groups—Clinton withdrew her nomination.
Guinier spoke at Rochester’s annual diversity conference and expressed concerns about whether an upcoming Supreme Court decision would continue to permit race to be a factor in college admissions. She commented that the Supreme Court did not seem eager to have race in the equation for diversity.
(University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster)
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
November 5, 2018
The basketball icon, author, and activist spoke at a packed Palestra, discussing many issues dividing Americans—including racism, economic inequality, and social injustice.
“We have to overcome fear,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “We have to learn to appreciate that people of intelligence come in all shapes and sizes and colors. And if we don’t learn to appreciate that, then I think we’re just doomed as a species.”
(University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster)
Angela Davis
March 5, 2019
Six months before her induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, scholar and political activist Angela Davis spoke at Strong Auditorium to discuss “The University’s Role in Educating Students to be Engaged Citizens.” A leader in social justice for decades, Davis told her Rochester audience, “Young people have always been at the forefront of change. Always. Revolutions are always in the first place led by younger generations. This is how change happens.”
(University of Rochester photo / Adrian Kraus)
Ibram X. Kendi
February 24, 2021
The antiracist activist and author was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2020, and the Covid-19 pandemic prevented him from delivering his address in person. But Kendi told a virtual audience of 3,000 that “the very heartbeat of racism is denial,’’ adding that “when people say they’re not racist, they’re sharing the words that white supremacists use. Jim Crow segregationists said they weren’t racist. Lynchers argued they weren’t racist; the problem was the people they lynched. Slave owners said the same thing.”
Kendi argued that to be antiracist is to admit that past actions by individuals and by governments were racist and to say, “When I supported it, I was being racist, but I’m going to change it and be different.”’
(University of Rochester photo / Lori Packer)
Learn more
Celebrating two decades of the MLK Commemorative AddressSince 2001, some of the nation’s highest profile leaders in diversity and civil rights have spoken at this annual event.
Ibram X. Kendi: ‘The very heartbeat of racism is denial’The antiracist activist and author spoke on several current issues at the University’s MLK Address.
Meet the Black Alumni NetworkLearn about this leadership organization that seeks to empower, connect, and celebrate the University’s Black community.
