Word: kenyatta
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Born in the "West End" ghetto of Chester. Pennsylvania, Kenyatta--unlike most law students--spent his childhood attending a segregated elementary school. Soon after his fourteenth birthday, he was ordained a Baptist minister at Chester's Calvary Baptist Church. He has been a minister for almost 25 years now and has spent most of that time as a civil rights activist. His activism has led to threats on his life by both the FBI and "Black Mafia" drug dealers, he says...
Outwardly, Kenyatta does not fit most people's idea of a radical activist He is average height, a little heavy-set, and has an average-looking face. Like most men of his age, he is getting a hint of gray in his hair, carries a briefcase and has teenage children. He speaks in a calm, soft voice, even when discussing an issue about which he feels deeply, for instance, his decision to attend law school because of the law's importance to civil rights...
...Kenyatta recently gained prominence in the Harvard community as an organizer of a nationally controversial boycott of a Law School civil rights course. The boycott protests the assignment of Jack Greenberg, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as co-instructor of "Racial Discrimination and Civil Rights." Students had hoped the Law School administration would see the course as an opportunity to add a minority faculty member to its 58-man, one-woman, one-Black tenured staff. Instead, Vorenberg, appointed Greenberg, who is white, and J. Levonne Chambers, Black president of the NAACP fund, who has declined a permanent...
...president of the Black Law Students Association (BLSA), Kenyatta has been an active spokesman for the boycott both inside and outside Harvard. Minority groups chose him last spring to write a letter explaining the boycott to Greenberg and Chambers. Law School Dean James Vorenberg sent a copy of that letter, along with a draft containing his own anti-boycott stance, to law students over the summer. The national media also obtained copies of the letter and quoted from it in articles about the boycott, most of which criticized the boycotting student for what one columnist called "banal ethnocenricism...
...addition to his anger about what he sees as indifference to minority concerns at the Law School. Kenyatta has reservations about the teachers themselves. "They represent civil rights strategies from the 1950s," he says. "They are woefully out of date with what is going on in this country." The economic conditions of American Blacks are worse than they were ten years ago, he claims, blaming this in part to the failure of past civil rights strategies...