The Inner-City Child

Dr. Miller, Dean Howard, ladies and gentlemen: You have done me a great honor to ask me here to participate in the Charles Thompson Lecture Series, thereby adding my name to a list of lecturers far more distinguished than I. You have done me a great honor simply to invite me to this great university, which though I am not an alumnus, has nevertheless nurtured me in many ways. The first lawyer who ever paid me to do legal work is a distinguished graduate of the Howard Law School, Justice Thurgood Marshall. Howard University also added spice to the portion of my career I spent in journalism. I never enjoyed covering an event more than the one about ten years ago where Dr. Faustine Jones-Wilson discussed her then most recent work in New York and ever so deliberately, ever so politely, ever so delicately, and ever so brilliantly sliced up one of the nation's leading neoconservatives. It gave me the greatest pleasure to report that event for the New York Times. Finally, you have done me a great honor by asking me to share this platform with another distinguished alumnus of Howard University, Dr. Kenneth Bancroft Clark. A few years ago, at a critical juncture in my life, this man unilaterally elected himself my older brother. I had no recourse but to accept, and he has fulfilled that role as richly and as fully as he might have had we been brothers of the full blood. He is, moreover, the mentor of my twenty-eight-year-old daughter and the godfather of my four-year-old daughter. My older daughter paid him the highest compliment the other day: Working for Dr. Clark changed me from an airhead to a serious person, she said

Geography · Inner city · Regional science · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law, Rights, and Freedoms · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies