`STATUS QUO IS INJUSTICE'

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 2, 1992                   TAG: 9202020229
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE                                LENGTH: Medium
`STATUS QUO IS INJUSTICE'
The president of the United Negro College Fund said Saturday it makes economic as well as moral sense to continue affirmative action programs that place women and minorities in colleges and jobs long dominated by white males.
By ending affirmative action, "All you are doing is equalizing this country in the status quo and the status quo is still a status quo of injustice," William Gray said.
Gray, a former Democratic representative from Philadelphia, told students at a national conference on university race relations that they need to know both the history of the civil rights movement and demographics to understand the conflict over affirmative action.
"Those who now say we have to have a race-neutral society, many of them are the same people who opposed the civil rights movement." Those people, he said, have duped supporters in the younger generation who did not experience the painful and revolutionary transition from a segregated society.
"This country, this university, is stronger because of integration," Gray said at the University of Virginia, where black students were not admitted in significant numbers until 1978 through affirmative action.
In eight years, Gray said, 85 percent of the new workers in the United States will be women, blacks and other minorities and new immigrants.
Unless the doors of opportunity continue to be widened, "America will not continue to be the strongest nation."
More than 150 students from 13 schools participated in the race relations conference.
It was sponsored by Students United to Promote Racial Awareness, an organization of blacks and whites that started at the University of Virginia Law School and has spread to several other colleges.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB