A conference last week at Columbia University was one the most important ones I’ve ever attended. It was organized to develop strategies to counter the Right-wing’s slick and well-financed campaign to distort the truth about affirmative action and other social issues.

Scheduled to speak was a Who’s Who of the Civil Rights Movement and academia: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Chair Mary Frances Berry; Ted Shaw, the new head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund; Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights; Derrick Bell, author and professor of law at New York University; Columbia University President Lee Bollinger; Claude Steele, chair of the psychology department at Stanford University and Tim Wise, director of the Association for White Anti-Racist Education , among others.

Workshops were organized to develop a better communications strategy, to improve research, to find ways to defend affirmative action at the state level and to help universities maintain diversity programs.

The conference was organized by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of approximately 180 civil and human rights groups; Americans for a Fair Chance, a pro-affirmative action group and the African-American Policy Forum, headed by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia University, and Luke Charles Harris, a professor of political science at Vassar College.

On Wednesday, the day before the conference was to begin, a group of teaching and research assistants interested in forming a union at Columbia University, informed conference organizers that if they went forward with the two-day session, they would picket the conference site. The group, Graduate Student Employees United, is affiliated with Local 2110 of the United Auto Workers. Although best known for organizing auto workers, the UAW also represents white collar technical and professional workers, state employees, teachers and daycare workers.

For the next 24 hours, Wade Henderson, Kim Crenshaw and Luke Charles Harris were frantically trying to negotiate a settlement with UAW local leaders. They pointed out that UAW had known about the conference for six months and had raised no objections. More important, there were numerous activities being held on campus that were not being picketed. Several proposals were made to accommodate the teaching assistants movement, including allowing them to state their grievances as part of the conference. However, those overtures were rejected. When appeals were made to national UAW leaders, they refused to reverse the decision.

Presented with the choice of crossing a picket line or attending the conference, Wade Henderson’s LCRR and Americans for a Fair Chance pulled out of the conference, as did several other participants. When Crenshaw and I spoke on Thursday, she asked whether I was still willing to serve as a panelist and my reply was, “I don’t care if they put up a picket line around the podium, I’ll be there.”

It’s not that I am anti-labor. Rather, I am pro-anything that benefits my people. In this instance, I wasn’t the one who crossed the line. It was organized labor – and some of our leaders who caved in to their outrageous demand – that crossed the line. They crossed the line by showing that when the interests of people of color are pitted against the interests of largely White graduate assistants who earn the equivalent of $40,000 in stipends and tuition benefits, organized labor will betray us.

This is also a test for civil rights leaders. I understand the need for compromise, especially if you’re part of a coalition in which a member has grievances. But when it comes to doing something as important as trying to counter the Far Right, nothing should take precedence over our agenda. The dirty little secret is that organized labor provides substantial funding for civil rights organizations and in exchange for money, they exercise veto power over any major decision made by civil rights leaders. Labor exercised that clout at Columbia and people of color were the losers.

To their credit, professors Crenshaw and Harris did not cancel the conference. And many respected figures in our community, including Ted Shaw and Derrick Bell, did not buckle under pressure. As a result, the conference was excellent. It did not provide all the answers to our problems – no single conference can do that – but it was a good beginning, as was an earlier conference at the University of Michigan organized by the Equal Justice Society in San Francisco.

More than anything else, the Columbia fiasco underscores the need for people of color to finance our own movements and not be overly reliant on allies who will betray us when it suits their needs.