Walters Highlights Brown v. Board Discussions February 16

SALISBURY, MD--- A nationwide commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision making segregated schools illegal continues at Salisbury University with a lecture by one of the nation’s leading African-American political scholars, Dr. Ronald Walters. An award-winning writer and nationally recognized political analyst, Walters speaks at 7 p.m. Monday, February 16, in the Wicomico Room of the Guerrieri University Center. His talk is titled “Brown vs. board of Education:  What has 50 years accomplished?”  Professor with the Government and Politics Department at the University of Maryland College Park, Walters has appeared on CNN’s Crossfire, CBS News Nightline, The Today Show, C-Span, The McNeil/Lehrer News Hour, The Jesse Jackson Show and BET’s Lead Story. He also served as a senior correspondent for the National Newspaper Publishers Association and political analyst for Lead Story during the 2000 presidential election. Walters is the author of six books, including Black Presidential Politics in America, which won the American Political Science Association’s Ralph Bunche Prize and National Conference of Black Political Scientists. His book Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora also won the conference’s Best Book Award. A visiting professor at Princeton University and former chair of Brandeis University’s Afro-American Studies Program, Walters is the distinguished leadership scholar and director of the African-American Leadership Institute at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park. He served with Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, and was a senior staff member for Rep. Charles Diggs Jr. and Rep. William Gray. Walters is a senior policy consultant to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and director of the Scholar/Practitioner Program through the foundation’s Devolution Initiative Project. He has earned honors ranging from The Black Scholar Magazine’s Distinguished Scholar/Activist Award to the African Heritage Studies Association’s W.E.B. DuBois/Frederick Douglass Award. The case combined issues from Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia and Washington, D.C., leading the court to advocate desegregation and better conditions for African-American students. Walters’ lecture is sponsored by SU’s Office of Multiethnic Student Services and the Union of African-American Students. The event is free and the public is cordially invited. For more information call 410-543-6030 or visit the SU Web site at www.salisbury.edu.