With whispers that a hundred more were waiting outside, they filled the hall, charged with the anticipation of hearing the charismatic new voice of the Democratic Party, United States Senatorial candidate from Illinois, Barack Obama, and listening as a panel of luminaries offered their views on Brown vs. Board of Education: Mission Accomplished?

Last Wednesday, hundreds of people gathered for this year’s forum hosted by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. The subject was Black and Blue: Policing the Color Line and featured two panel discussions.

A group of retired athletes, academics, writers and social activists convened a forum on race and gender in sports here this week, and generally described a bleak landscape for the African American athlete in the 21st century.

The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, headed by Prof. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., staged its annual Vineyard forum Wednesday, this year entitled Between the Lines: Race and Gender in Sports in the 21st Century.

It was billed as a public forum on race, gender, age and religion in the 2008 election, but right from the outset it was clear that one of the four topics would dominate the discussion held before a huge crowd of more than 900 people at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School Performing Arts Center on Wednesday.

Alienated and impoverished young African Americans are being recruited to radical Islam, and could yet produce black America’s version of 9/11, a Christian Community leader has warned.

“I’m telling you, it’s a ticking bomb,” the Rev. Eugene Rivers, pastor of the Azusa Christian Community, told a conference on Race, Religion and Reason at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School on Wednesday.