Since taking over Fisk University’s Race Relations Institute two
years ago, Dr. Raymond Winbush has been aggressive about revitalizing
the once-prominent institute and resuscitating its showpiece — an
annual summer seminar which died sixteen years ago.
When former Fisk President Henry Ponder lured Winbush from his post
as professor and director of the Black Cultural Center at Vanderbilt
University, Fisk’s institute had no director, no budget and few
programs. Today, bolstered by more than $4 million in private and
corporate grants and the renewed commitment from Fisk officials, the
fifty-five-year-old institute is making a comeback.
Winbush is euphoric about the resurrection of the institute and
mesmerized by the thought of unleashing it onto a society he says is
more racially hostile than when it began. In 1942, the United States
was allied with most of Europe in an attempt to dismantle Adolph
Hitler’s Nazi regime and its racial-superiority philosophy. That was
the same year that Charles Spurgeon Johnson, Fisk’s first African
American president, created the Race Relations Institute to address
divisions among racial, religious and ethnic groups.
The Tennessee campus–which once courted Fannie Lou Hamer, Thurgood
Marshall, A. Philip Randolph and Hubert Humphrey–will convene the
institute’s thirty-fourth conference July 8-13, the first major
conference since 1983.
“We’re inviting a lot of people,” Winbush boasts.
Among the 300 people invited are: President Bill Clinton; Ralph
Reed, former president of the Christian Coalition; Harry Allen, a
member of the rap group Public Enemy; Lerone Bennett Jr., editor of
Ebony Magazine, and 1996 Republican presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan.
“We want them to come to Fisk to discuss America’s most troubling
problem — which is race — just the way Johnson did it,” says Winbush.
