Racial Justice Breakfast
The Annual Racial Justice Breakfast was established in 2001 to promote the YWCA’s mission to eliminate racism and create a safe space where participants can confront racism. Attendees experience meaningful dialogue about racism’s personal and community-wide effects and hear from keynote speakers who have had a national impact on landmark civil rights cases.
Tuesday, October 11, 2022
8:00-9:30 a.m.
Cincinnati Music Hall
2022 Keynote Speaker Dorothy Roberts
STRUCTURAL RACISM & HEALTH INEQUITIES
2022 Keynote Speaker Dorothy Roberts is an internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate. She studies the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. Professor of Africana Studies, Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Dorothy directs the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society.
She has authored and co-edited ten books, including the award-winning Killing the Black Body; Shattered Bonds; and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century. She has also written more than 100 articles and book chapters, including “Race” in the 1619 Project. She received the 2015 Solomon Carter Fuller Award from the American Psychiatric Association for “providing significant benefit for the quality of life for Black people.”
2022 Racial Justice Award Honorees
Ozie Davis and Claire Mengel
2021 Keynote Speaker Richard Rothstein
THE COLOR OF LAW:
A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Richard Rothstein is a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, which details how federal, state, and local policy explicitly segregated metropolitan areas nationwide, creating racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that violate the Constitution and require remediation. He is also the author of many other articles and books on race and education, including Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black–White Achievement Gap and Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right.
2021 Racial Justice Award Honorees
Renee Mahaffey Harris and Bishop Ennis Tait
2020 Keynote Speaker Christina Fialho
As Co-Founder/Executive Director of Freedom for Immigrants (formerly CIVIC), Christina has advocated for immigrants for over 15 years. She started the first immigration detention visitation program in California with her co-founder, Christina Mansfield while still in law school. Their organization mobilized a network of watchdog community members that visit weekly at approximately 70 immigration detention facilities, while creating an alternative model to detention that welcomes immigrants. Christina has also drafted and passed several laws to put a moratorium on immigration detention expansion and fund community-based alternatives. She was appointed to the California Bar Association’s first Civil Justice Strategies Task Force and has received multiple awards including the 2020 John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award.
2020 Racial Justice Award Honorees
Vincent R. Brown and Dr. Janet Reid
2019 Fall Speaker Taylor Branch & Panel Discussion
Over the course of his storied career, author and historian Taylor Branch has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Lifetime Achievement Award, and a National Humanities Medal. His landmark narrative history of the Civil Rights Era, America in the King Years, required more than 24 years of intensive research as he sought to illuminate not only the life of the man, but also the times in which he lived. Branch began his career in 1970 as a staff journalist for The Washington Monthly, Harper’s, and Esquire. He holds honorary doctoral degrees from over a dozen colleges and universities.
If Dr. King Could See Us Now: Panel of local experts on current issues
2019 Spring Keynote Speaker Roy Austin
As an Honors Trial Attorney with the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division, Roy investigated & prosecuted hate crimes & police brutality, including the civil lawsuit preventing racial profiling by the California Highway Patrol. He was appointed Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in 2010 and became Deputy Assistant to the President for the Office of Urban Affairs, Justice & Opportunity in 2014, where he co-authored a report on Big Data & Civil Rights, worked with the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, helped develop the Police Data Initiative & was a member of President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Task Force.
2019 Racial Justice Award Honorees
Chip Harrod and Iris Roley
2018 Keynote Speaker Fania Davis
Co-Founder and Director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY), and national thought leader in the field of civil rights, Fania Davis is a long-time social justice activist, a restorative justice scholar and professor, and a civil rights attorney. Fania’s passion for social transformation has remained strong – from her role leading the international campaign to secure the release of her sister, Angela Davis, from prison in the 1970’s to her current focus on a truth and reconciliation process focused on the historic racial trauma that continues to haunt the United States.
2018 Racial Justice Award Honorees
Shakila Ahmad and Dr. Clarence G. Newsome
- 2017 – Keynote, Adam Foss; Racial Justice Awards, Donna Jones Baker and Robert Brand Newmand
- 2016 – Keynote, Bryan Stevenson; Racial Justice Awards, Mary Asbury and Kenneth L. Parker
- 2015 – Keynote, Kimberle’ Crenshaw; Racial Justice Awards, Sister Rose Ann Fleming, David Singleton
- 2014 – Keynote, Michelle Alexander; Racial Justice Awards, Alphonse A. Gerhardstein, Pauline Strayhorne
- 2013 – Keynote, Richard Thompson Ford; Racial Justice Awards, Judge S. Arthur Speigel, Judge Nathaniel R. Jones
- 2012 – Keynote, Andrew Young; Racial Justice Awards, Frances Wilson Canty, David Fankhauser and Betty Rosemond
- 2011 – Keynote, Julian Bond; Racial Justice Awards, Marian and Donald Spencer
- 2010 – Keynote, Charles J. Ogletree, Jr; Racial Justice Awards, John and Francie Pepper
- 2009 – Keynote, Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum; Racial Justice Awards, Judge Jack Sherman and Bea Larsen
- 2008 – Keynote, Thomas N. Todd; Racial Justice Awards, Charles M. Judd and Judge Susan Dlott
- 2007 – Keynote, Morris S. Dees, Jr; Racial Justice Awards, P. Jeane and William Goings
- 2006 – Keynote, John Payton; Racial Justice Award, Judge Robert L. Black, Jr
- 2005 – Keynote, Gay J. McDougall; Racial Justice Award, Judge William A. McClain
- 2004 – Keynote, Fred D. Gray; Racial Justice Award, Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth
- 2003 – Keynote, Melba Patillo Beals
- 2002 – Keynote, Douglas Jones
- 2001 – Panel Discussion, Judge Nathaniel R. Jones, Sharon J. Zealey, Judge Jack Sherman, Jr, Nancy A. Lawson