The United States is still a place of "chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs," said Cornel West, a professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton University.
West - author of the critically acclaimed books - "Democracy Matters" and "Race Matters," spoke Wednesday on Douglass campus about "Why Democracy Demands Quality, Diversity and Leadership in Universities."
His lecture - which held a standing-room only crowd in Trayes Hall - offered insight into the states of diversity in people's schools, homes, hearts and minds. He also offered advice to the larger powers that be but also to the individual, as he or she acts on his or her beliefs.
"You must have courage every day," West said. "The courage to die."
He told stories of the courage of Mamie Till, the mother of Emmett Till.
Till, 14 years old in 1955, was brutally killed by whites who claimed Emmett whistled at a white woman. Mamie chose to hold an open-casket funeral, showing her son's tortured body, despite the federal government's insistence Emmett's viewing be closed-casket. This is the type of courage West said people need to have.
West opens a three-day conference for University faculty members who are addressing the issue of diversity on the different campuses. Currently, University President Richard L. McCormick has created an office of faculty diversity to address the low numbers of minority faculty at the University.
Introducing his lecture were several University officials, including Douglass College Dean Carmen Twillie Ambar and McCormick.
"Our students are diverse," McCormick said. However, the faculty and staff are lacking diversity, he said.
West agreed the University student body is diverse, at least more than Harvard and Princeton Universities, but that progress still needs to be made.
West discussed racism he felt as a black professor at Harvard, before he started teaching at Princeton. He talked about Harvard's President Lawrence Summers' recent comments about how women were not as suited as men for math and science studies.
Summers' comments were fodder for a heated question-and-answer period after West's lecture, as audience members from several University campuses raised issues of their personal experiences with race matters and of more generalized comments.
West originally began teaching religion at Princeton in 1988, as well as spending five years as director of the African American studies program there.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard in 1973, West became involved with the W.E.B Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research there in 1993 before returning to Princeton in 2002. However, West still could not get a taxi cab in New York City, he wrote in "Race Matters."
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