400 S Orange Ave, South Orange Village, NJ 07079

 

 

We are especially proud to announce that Claude Cummings Jr., president of the Communications Workers of Americawill be this year's honoree and recipient of the James Clyburn "Vaults of Opportunity" Award.  

Our 2025 Shirley Chisholm, Breakthrough Leader, is the original breakthrough leader and Chisholm protégé Congresswoman Barbara Lee (currently running for mayor of Oakland, California).

Other speakers include:

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MoreRegister Today.

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Dear Civil Rights Leader,

We will kick off the Summit on Thursday evening, May 8th, with a powerful faith, labor, and civil rights Unity Gathering at Fountain Baptist Church in Summit, NJ. The conference portion of the Summit will take place Friday, May 9th, from 9 AM to 4 PM at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ.

We are especially proud to announce that Claude Cummings Jr., president of the Communications Workers of America, will join this year’s Summit as an honored guest and keynote speaker. President Cummings was elected in 2023 as the first African American leader of North America’s largest communications, media, and public sector workers union. Other prominent faith, labor, and civil rights leaders

Since 2017, the Summit for Civil Rights has held a series of gatherings with prominent clergy, labor leaders, civil rights leaders, elected officials, and scholars to warn against ignoring the economic and social underpinnings of the populist upheaval of the past decade.

We will again gather on May 8th and 9th of 2025 to assess the current political and economic landscape and to review, renew, and put forward a nonpartisan agenda for fully inclusive middle-class opportunity in work, schools, and housing.

You can go here to register and sponsor or for more information about sponsorship levels and packages.

We look forward to seeting you at the Summit,

Sincerely,

Rev. Dr. Willie D. Francois, Summit Co-Chair and Social Justice Chair, Progressive National Baptist Convention, and Pastor of Fountain Baptist Church, Summit, NJ.

Anthony Abrantes, Summit Co-Chair and Assistant Executive Secretary-Treasurer, Eastern Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters.

LaRae Smith, Summit Co-Chair and Civil Rights Chair at Shiloh Baptist Church, One Family Two Locations (Port Norris and Vineland, NJ), Dr. James Dunkins, Senior Pastor.

Myron Orfield, Summit Founding Director and Professor of Law and Director, Institute for Metropolitan Opportunity, University of Minnesota Law School

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THE SUMMIT FOR CIVIL RIGHTS 2025

Beyond the Politics of Division and Dread…

… and toward a New Populism of Unity and Opportunity.

As we again pass another deeply contentious election season, the contradictions around class and race among the constituencies, institutions, and interests (in both parties) remain fundamentally unresolved and unreconciled. The compelling attraction to a crude and incoherent populist agenda and an insurgent political movement that feeds off these contradictions will not go away anytime soon.

The Summit for Civil Rights is a national coalition of constituency leaders from the uniquely American Tripartite Alliance of labor, civil rights, and the faith community who have sharply challenged (and offered an alternative path to) the dominant liberal and conservative establishment narratives and policies that have given rise to an enduring and powerful right-wing populism.

The Summit for Civil Rights will make a case not for a resistance to or denial of populism but a restoration of a powerful American movement that reconciles class and race and is adapted to (and with an analysis of) the very significant changes in our geography, demographics, economy, and technology over the past four decades.

These dynamics have not only divided, weakened, and atomized working people; they drive and have been driven by an unprecedented surge in economic inequality and some of the most obscene concentrations of wealth and political power in our nation’s history.

These are not overcomplicated or unfamiliar concepts of rule by divide and conquer, but the current alignment in our establishment politics, whether on the liberal left or conservative right, both dominated by greedy corporate interests and narcissistic oligarchs, has been incapable of advancing an agenda or strategy that will challenge the status quo and unite working and middle-class families of all races and backgrounds around a truly progressive agenda for inclusive opportunity and equality.

Because of the utter failure of establishment institutions and coalitions (including the corporate media, major donors, think tanks, liberal foundations, and “expert” political professionals), it must fall to those people-based associations and organizations (and the leaders who represent and are accountable only to working men and women) to lead America out of its deepening political quagmire. Building One America believes that the vanguard of such a movement must come from: 1) the leadership of predominately and historically Black-led organizations, including the Black church and chapter-based civil rights organizations; 2) the leadership of a unified labor movement, including the building trades, service and public sectors, transportation, and manufacturing unions; and 3) local elected leaders who represent and are accountable to a diverse working to middle-class constituency.

There are many who think these associations and networks (including labor and civil rights organizations) are not powerful, sophisticated, or unified enough today to go up against the enormous power of the reactionary right. Perhaps they are not. But neither is the corporate liberal establishment that has shown itself (twice now) to be far more feckless, incompetent, and completely disconnected from ordinary Americans than many of us wanted to believe. And the larger bipartisan structures of institutional power that Donald Trump broke through in 2016 and 2024 have revealed themselves to be a fragile house of cards. He was not stopped by a determined Republican establishment in 2016 or the powerful Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. He was not stopped by Congress, the Justice Department, the “intelligence community,” or the bulk of the mainstream media and culture. And he was outspent three to one in the most expensive political campaign in the history of the world. After Obama’s shocking 2008 insurgency in defiance of his own party and Senator Sanders startling near-breakthroughs in 2016 and 2020, perhaps Trump is not as much the phenomenon as is the staggering hollowness, ineptitude, and unpopularity of our two-party political establishment.

So long as we continue to rely on the experts, elites, and oligarchs who are out of touch with working people and their values, we can expect to see populist anger coopted and exploited by the right with an anemic pro-establishment response from the liberal left.

The Black church, the American labor movement, and the modern civil rights movement, however flawed or diminished in size or reputation, are still with us, still organized, and still self-governed. And the institutional and relational linkages within and between them are still extensive and deep and manifestly American.

“...We are (still) the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

 

The 2023 Summit for Civil Rights, chaired by New Jersey based Pastor Willie D. Francois III and Ohio Civil Rights labor leader Petee Talley, included powerful and inspirational speakers with  experienced and insightful practitioners, scholars, and constituency leaders. The inspiring messages, sophisticated analysis, and timely message to "reclaim populism" led to a prophetic call to action to organize and mobilize for multi-racial power and expanded inclusive middle-class opportunity.

Dr. Otis Moss Jr. provided an authoritative and personal perspective, as a reminder of the critical role that the Black church, Black leaders and Black institutions played in defeating Jim Crow and moving our whole country forward.
 
Panels of experts and practitioners drew parallels and lessons to connect the role of racial segregation and concentrated poverty to many of our most pressing issues from mass incarceration to urban sprawl and environmental degradation.
 
The first day of the Summit closed with a rousing message of hope and power from Dr. Frederick D. Haynes, the new president of the National Rainbow / Push Coalition, who reminded us that “We are the Ones we have been waiting for”. 

The second day of the Summit continued with a deeper analysis of the color line in America and the consequences for communities, families and children caught on the “wrong” side of it. Two panels amplified the presentation given by David Rusk with real-life implications and examples around education, economic opportunity, work, and the environment.

Former Congresswoman Brenda Lawrence helped shift the conversation from problems to solutions as she told her own story of breakthrough leadership and the multi racial and interfaith coalitions she built in her diverse district.

The afternoon presentations concluded with a groundbreaking analysis of changing metropolitan demographics and the critical role of suburban Black voters in building multi-racial power for progress and opportunity.

After a brief awards ceremony that included a tribute to professors John Bracy and Bill Spriggs, AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Fred Redmond gave a powerful and rousing closing address in which he called on all of us who care about racial, economic, and social justice to “reclaim populism” and rebuild the non-partisan multi racial collations needed to defend and expand an inclusive American middle class.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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2023 Summit Sponsors

 

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BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE
 
The first Summit for Civil Rights began on November 9, 2017 at the University of Minnesota Law School in Minneapolis. It was held a year to the day after the election of Donald J. Trump and featured Majority Whip James E. Clyburn, Vice President Walter Mondale and many others. Since then, we have held two more gatherings sponsored by Rutgers University School of Labor Relations in New Brunswick, NJ and Georgetown University Law School’s Workers’ Rights Institute in Washington, DC.  Between events, a core committee of Summit organizers representing civil rights scholars, labor leaders, law students, clergy and elected officials have been assembling research and analysis to produce a set of recommendations for a strategic approach and a policy agenda to address some of the most critical issues facing our country.

The Summit for Civil Rights held this past July was the latest in the series of three convenings that included, among others: House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn, House Committee on Education and Labor Chairman Robert C. “Bobby” Scott, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, NEA President Becky Pringle, NAACP President Derrick Johnson, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Vice President Walter Mondale, AME Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, NAACP Legal Defense Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill, AFT President Randi Weingarten, Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman; and many other civil rights activists, litigators, scholars and experts in education, housing, finance and labor .  

Our third Summit was held virtually under the cloud of the health emergency and economic catastrophe resulting from the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Despite the immediate crisis of the pandemic, the Summit for Civil Rights conference maintained its focus on addressing the three main interrelated topics listed above: racial injustice, economic inequality and political polarization in America. We did not ignore the pandemic. On the contrary, the still unfolding crisis has acted as an ill-timed and regrettable overlay that seems to have only magnified racial disparities, deepened economic inequality and widened the political divide.

This document is an attempt to summarize some of the key areas of transformational reform we believe can and must be pursued by Congress and the new Administration to move our country in a different and better direction. It hopes to unite the energies and the constituencies committed to racial justice and those focused on middle-class opportunity for all Americans—especially groups tied to civil rights and organized labor, including faith communities and local elected officials. Much of this argues for a regional, or metropolitan, approach to bringing us closer together as a country socially, politically and economically.

 

2017 Summit Program and Agenda

2019 Summit Agenda

2020 Summit Agenda

2020 100 Day White House Policy Summit Agenda

Summary of Transition Recommendations

An Agenda for Racial Justice and Middle Class Opportunity for All Americans Within a Metropolitan Framework

On July 30 and 31, 2020, over 50 civil rights leaders, including renowned scholars and litigators, clergy and faith leaders, grassroots organizers, labor union presidents and elected officials including powerful members of Congress, convened with over 500 participants to examine and call for action on today’s triple crisis of deadly racial injustice, vanishing middle class opportunity and toxic political polarization. One of our central conclusions is that spatial disparities (segregation by race and income), especially across America’s metropolitan regions, are significant and critical drivers of structural inequalities in wealth, education and opportunity, widening both race and class divides and contributing to our already fractured politics. What follows are recommendations for federal action for reducing these disparities and expanding an inclusive middle class through structural reform at the regional level.