The National Urban League (NUL) started the second day of its four-day conference in Boston on July 28, with a talk by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates (no relation).
Henry Gates, who in addition to holding a faculty position at Harvard University sits on the board of the gene-testing company 23 and Me, said at the conference that the company will be giving away 10,000 free gene tests to African-Americans in order to foster more African-American representation in genetics research. The historian announced that 2,500 of those tests, which use human saliva to discover an individual’s ethnic makeup, would be given to those present at the conference.
Gates took a DNA test and was surprised to find how much of his ancestry was European. He hosted and narrated a television series ,“Faces of America,” tracing the genealogy and genetics of famous Americans, from Eva Longoria to Chris Rock to Stephen Colbert.
Businessman and philanthropist Bill Gates also spoke at the conference’s component on education, saying there is a need for radical education reform. This reform does not necessarily require more money, he said.
He said officials can’t simply throw money at the problem. There have been poor schools that have been highly successful, Gates said.
Educational reform must include a change in the culture of schools and teachers, in which new values for teachers are fostered.
Teacher improvement, Gates said, is crucial to providing better education for minorities and underprivileged youth. Teacher improvement can be fostered through setting up peer review workshops, videotaping classroom sessions and later reviewing them, and to a certain point, assessment through testing.
The education component of the NUL’s annual conference was a segment in the agenda. This year’s focus is building jobs in America.
“We are facing a desperate economic crisis in this country,” said Teresa Candori, the press spokesperson of the NUL. The conference, aims to rebuild the economy through a 12-point plan, which lays out 12 different elements of a comprehensive system.
The plan includes local and international measures to boost the economy, including the expansion of minority participation in jobs and the restoration of the Summer Youth Jobs Program, which aims to employ 500 million youth in the summer of 2011.
The conference, from July 27 to July 30, is expected to bring several thousand people to Boston throughout the weekend.
A point sure to attract people is the free career fair that the program organizers are offering, in which several dozen employees will be present and looking out for possible new job candidates. The conference is also offering workshops for resume building and interviewing techniques.
An impressive list of speakers was on the roster, including civil rights activist and commentator the Rev. Al Sharpton; Amy Dubois Barnett, the editor-in-chief of Ebony Magazine; and Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
The National Urban League is the oldest and largest nonpartisan community-based organization in America, advocating for the empowerment of African-Americans since 1910.
