This Wednesday, over 50 years after Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to the Bowdoin community in May of 1964, the annual lecture commemorating King took place online, featuring renowned speaker and author Beverly Tatum, H’06.
Tatum, president emerita of Spelman College, is the author of the bestselling book “Why Are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria” and a leading speaker on issues of race and racism.
The Department of Athletics released its Building and Supporting an Inclusive and Diverse Athletic Community Action Plan on October 15 in an aim to address bias reported within the department.
The action plan is broken up into three sections—Access to Information, Ongoing Evaluation, and Education and Action.
Cara Drinan ’96, a professor of law at the Catholic University of America, joined Bowdoin students and faculty on October 7 for a virtual discussion titled “Race, Crime and COVID-19.” Drinan has become a prominent figure in the battle for criminal justice reform, specializing in the right to counsel and juvenile sentencing.
This fall, a group of students is engaging in a six-week workshop series called “Race, Power, Oppression, and Liberation.” Responding to students’ interest in engaging in racial justice work at Bowdoin and beyond, the workshop will meet weekly to discuss personal identity and power, institutional and social systems of oppression, anti-racist work and liberation.
Bowdoin’s athletic department held a mandatory discussion on race for all athletic teams last Wednesday. While it was a first step to getting everyone involved with Bowdoin athletics on the same page about race and the language surrounding race, many students felt as though it didn’t address key problems in the athletic department—most prominently, that of privilege.
Channeling the momentum for racial justice activism sparked by the killing of George Floyd this May in Minneapolis, Preston Anderson ’22, a member of the Bowdoin sailing team, led the charge to change his conference’s bylaws and to implement mandatory race relations training in the New England Intercollegiate Sailing Association (NEISA).
On Sunday, the Athletes of Color Coalition (AoCC) released a list of demands for diversity reform in the athletic department. These include mandated race education for teams and an athletics-specific bias reporting process. The AoCC began circulating a petition, which invites community members to express support for these demands.
