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In short, "the choice before us is either the continued use of race conscious policies or the resegregation of American higher education."²⁶

This is a fight between good and evil, and evil must not win.

No one is neutral in this fight. In the civil rights movement in Mississippi, we used to sing a song:

They say in old Hinds County
No neutral have we met.
You're either a freedom fighter,
or a Tom for Ross Barnett.

The only thing in the middle of the road is a yellow line!

Outside this building there is a parking lot. Some of the spaces are reserved for handicapped drivers.

An able bodied driver enters the lot and sees that reserved space. He thinks he has been denied the right to park. He believes he would be out of his car and into the building if not for that reserved space. For him, the sum of the perceived lot if greater than the actual cost - he has lost something he deserved.

But no one "deserves" a space; instead, spaces have been provided for as many cars as the parking lot can accommodate. Taking away the handicapped spaces may make the able-bodied driver feel better, but it ultimately cheats us all. We are cheated of the presence of a man or a woman who may enrich our lives.

I am an optimist. It runs in my family. More than 100 years ago, in 1892, my grandfather said:

"The pessimist from his corner looks out on the world of wickedness and sin, and blinded by all that is good or hopeful in the condition and progress of the human race, bewails the present state of affairs and predict woeful things for the future."

"In every cloud he beholds a destructive storm, in every flash of lightning and omen of evil and in every shadow that falls