What would give anyone the idea that a woman who was the nation's first female African-American secretary of state, whose grandfather was the son of a sharecropper, who experienced Jim Crow firsthand during her childhood in Alabama, who was friends with one of the girls killed in the Birmingham Church bombing, whose parents instilled in her an ethic of striving despite the hatred around her would have anything relevant to say about civil rights?
The Minnesota professors say that it is in a “spirit of free expression” that they ask for the reversal of Rice’s invitation. Because nothing says free expression like shutting down someone’s lecture.