On Oct. 22, Fordham and the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities (CICU) hosted the 2017 College Access Fair for African-American/Black and Hispanic/Latino Students, the only one of its kind in the State of New York. The event was made possible thanks to a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Held at the Rose Hill campus, the event attracted 52 independent colleges and universities and an estimated 870 students from nearly 250 schools from the greater New York City region. An additional six organizations were represented, including The College Board, College Goal New York, and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.

Students and their families got a chance to talk with dozens of independent college and university admission and financial aid representatives, and to attend a series of workshops designed to aid in the admissions process. Among those workshops were How to Pay for College and Undocumented Students and the College Process.

“The event underscored for me the tenacity and support that some of these [students]need to make it through,” said Mary Beth Labate, president of CICU.

Fordham and CICU have worked together to sponsor the event since 2009 through various funding sources. Last year, Fordham received a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies to support the annual event beginning with the 2016 fair and running through 2018. (Photo by Bruce Gilbert)

Related Article:

Fordham Hosts Latino College Fair

First of all, allow me to echo Mike Stanton’s welcome to the faculty, students, and alumni of Fordham Law;

esteemed members of the bench and the bar; and all the friends of the Law School here tonight.

I am particularly delighted to welcome Attorney General Eric Holder back to New York. As you may know, Mr. Holder was born in the Bronx and attended high school, college, and law school here in Manhattan, at Stuyvesant and Columbia, respectively. (Mr. Attorney General, we will try not to hold that against you.)

Measured by any standard, Mr. Holder has had a most distinguished career in public service and the law. He began in the Justice Department’s then-new Public Integrity Section, where he assisted in the Abscam prosecutions, was appointed to the bench for the Superior Court of the District of Columbia by President Ronald Reagan, and subsequently became the first African American to be appointed United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, by President Bill Clinton. As you all know, he went on to become the first African American to be named United States Attorney General, under Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States.

Tonight we justly celebrate Mr. Holder’s stellar career and accomplishments. He has reached the highest echelons of his profession and (thank God) still has a long career ahead of him.

But let us be clear. We don’t just honor his accomplishments. After all, the Stein Prize is not really a lifetime achievement award. No. No. It is far more than that. The prize was established at a critical moment in our nation’s history, and it was established as a response to that critical moment. Let me take it further and say that it was not established as a response or a reaction to a critical moment. It was established as a challenge to recommit the nation to its most cherished ideals, and to do so by shining an approving spotlight on women and men of conscience who have devoted themselves to public service.

Hmmm. Conscience. Devotion to ideals. Courage. ‎ If you put it all together, it is clear that the Stein Prize was and is intended to honor women and men of integrity who have the courage to ask bold questions, unsettling questions, inconvenient questions, necessary questions, questions that call us to live guided by our best angels—for the good of others.

Now, I may be wrong, but I think that Mr. Holder is just such a person. He is a man who clearly fell deeply in love with the ideals upon which our nation was founded at an early age. He is also a man who clearly believes that those transcendent ideals remain luminously important to us. It is precisely because he thinks this way that he has (over and over again) asked us to wrestle with tough questions so that we can create a more perfect union.

Part patriot, part prophet, he has insisted on calling us back to our foundational ideals. Part noodge and part pastor, he has insisted on challenging us to allow those best angels to which I referred a few moments ago to guide and inspire us. And he has done so with telling results. Along the way, he has also equipped us with the weapons and skills that we need to face and to face down the crises of our times with strength, conviction, principle, and character. And let us be frank here: we live in a time that has more than its share of crises and/or occasions for reflection and a recommitment to the ideals that we hope still define us as a nation.

Nowhere is the critical nature of the time in which we live felt with more of a sense of world-changing urgency than on our nation’s college campuses or in the hearts and souls of our students. Haunted or inspired by the same ideals that have always captivated and guided Mr. Holder, our students are asking bold, tough, unsettling (and saving) questions about justice, race, poverty, alienation, marginalization, empowerment, and the very redemption of our nation. Although they are not unique, Fordham students (like students at other colleges and universities) have thrown themselves into the saving work of wrestling with these great issues. In the process, they have called and challenged us to examine our lives and to recommit ourselves to living the kind of lives and being the kind of people we call them to be: men and women of character, men and women for others, men and women who will transform the world through love.

Mr. Holder, we rightly honor you tonight not just for your personal achievements, but for your strong and consistent work for immigrants, for hate crime laws, and for civil rights and voting rights. Far more, however, Mr. Attorney General, we honor you for being a man who is and can be a role model for our students: a man of principle, great heart, deep faith in the transforming power of the law, and a man of courage who can and does ask hard, unsettling, necessary questions, questions that call us to live lives with a noble sense of purpose. And just what is that noble sense of purpose? Quite simply this: the transformation and redemption of the world through service, service that is born of a restless love that seeks justice and that finds its perfect fulfillment in the creation of that more perfect union that our Founders dreamed of and challenged us to achieve.

Mr. Holder, continue to be part noodge and part prophet. Continue to challenge, inspire and unnerve us. Continue to be what we proclaim you to be to be this night: a true and worthy member of the Stein Prize pantheon! Congratulations.

Thank you.

Gordon-Reed, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, professor of history at Harvard, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, spoke at length on Feb. 9 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Manhattan.

Her talk, “Memorializing American Slavery,” was co-sponsored by Fordham’s Department of African and African-American Studies as part of its year-long Emancipation Series celebrating the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

For her work, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W. W. Norton, 2008), Gordon-Reed became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for history.
While researching the book, which details the relationship that Thomas Jefferson had with Sally Hemings, a mixed-race slave who was also his wife’s half-sister, Gordon-Reed found that the stories that were told about Hemings and Jefferson were given more credence when they were told by whites.

“African-American enslaved people were the only people who I think were made to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the things that happened to them in slavery,” she said. “The sympathy always tended to be with the people who were in power, that is to say southern slaveholders, doing things to make their descendents feel less guilty about what went on. That was a huge part of what was going on with the Jefferson-Hemings story.”

The biggest fallacy that Gordon-Reed aimed to dispel was the notion that enslaved African Americans did not value family ties. As an example of how the country’s legal system was stacked against them, she noted that the term that was used for illegitimate children such as Hemings, whose father was a slave master, was filius nullius, or “child of no one.”

“What historians have done is take that legal definition and act as if it were true, as if we can’t possibly know who their fathers were, and therefore Sally Hemings could have had children with anyone,” she said.

Although DNA testing in 1998 and a 2000 report by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation corroborate Gordon-Reed’s conclusion that Madison Hemings was truthful when he said that he and his three siblings were Thomas Jefferson’s children, the suspicion that Hemings’ paternity claim was greeted with, said Gordon-Reed, is indicative of a mistrust of blacks to be truthful.

“People criticize the black family … but it’s outsiders who imposed, from the time of slavery, this notion of the nonexistence of the black family, that the ties weren’t there. That kind of attitude is something that has helped shape the way people view the black [family]and unfortunately the way we see ourselves. Because white supremacy . . . if it’s powerful enough, it affects the way black people view one another. So we have to constantly fight against this, not just on the outside of the community, but in the way we view ourselves,” she said.

“This is an opportunity to show that when African-American people tell you what happened in slavery, that it’s truthful, and you should pay attention to it.”