(Chicago, IL – March 20, 2006) The New Coalition for Economic and Social Change announced today its plans to hold a major cultural event in the City of Chicago celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Booker T. Washington. The event will take place June 4-6, 2006.
Noted Lee Walker, president of The New Coalition, “This celebration will communicate Booker T. Washington’s pro-education, pro-entrepreneurship, and pro-self-reliance message to a new generation of civic and business leaders, academics, entrepreneurs, and students.”
The festivities will include free panel discussions with renowned scholars from across the country, to be held at the Thorne Auditorium on Northwestern University’s downtown Chicago campus. Among the speakers already confirmed are:
- William B. Allen, Ph.D., professor of political science at Michigan State University;
- Mark Bauerlein, Ph.D., professor of English at Emory University;
- John Sibley Butler, Ph.D., professor bf Business and Gale Chair in Entrepreneurship and Small Business at the University of Texas at Austin;
- Glenn C. Loury, Ph.D., professor of economics, Brown University;
- Robert J. Norrell, Ph.D., Professor of History and Bernadette Schmitt Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee;
- Marcus D. Pohlmann, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Political Science Department at Rhodes College;
- Christopher R. Reed, Ph.D., professor of history and former Seymour Logan Chair at Roosevelt University in Chicago;
- Peter W. Schramm, Ph.D., professor of political science at Ashland University and executive director of the John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs;
- Carol M. Swain, Ph.D., professor of political science and professor of law at Vanderbilt University;
- Daryl Williams, director of minority entrepreneurship programs at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation; and
- Frank Harold Wilson, Ph.D., associate professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
In addition to the free panel discussions, paid meal events at great Chicago locations will feature keynote addresses from prominent speakers. The opening dinner, on Sunday, June 4, will take place at the Chicago Athletic Club, as will breakfasts on Monday and Tuesday morning. Lunches will take place at the Union League Club (Monday) and Metropolitan Club (Tuesday), while dinners will be hosted by the DuSable Museum of African American History on Monday night and on the Spirit of Chicago cruising Lake Michigan on Tuesday.
The event has received generous support from individual donors and major nonprofit and corporate foundations. The New Coalition is reaching out to dozens of community leaders and organization to ensure broad-based public support for the event.
The New Coalition for Economic and Social Change is a national nonprofit organization based in Chicago devoted to advancing conservative multiculturalism, a way of looking at the social order that leads to conservative or libertarian conclusions, but that is filtered and changed by experiences both historic and personal that are not shared by whites.
For more information about the Booker T. Washington celebration or The New Coalition, please contact Lee Walker, president of The New Coalition, at 312/377-4000 or by email, [email protected].
Lee H. Walker was president of The New Coalition for Economic and Social Change and a senior fellow of The Heartland Institute. He was chairman of the Illinois State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
