"Some of the Chicana/o Caucus members heard him speak before and felt his delivery and messages were excellent. So we invited him," said College Diversity Coordinator Joel Estrada '00, who helped coordinate the conference.
Bradley was asked to speak about his experience as a black mayor in a predominantly Latino city. "I'm proud to be the mayor of Compton, a city of two oppressed people struggling to throw off the chains of history," he said. "I see no nationalities. I see the desire for equal opportunity."
Bradley took issue with being billed as a "black mayor." "I'm not a black mayor, and they're not Latinos; they're people," he said. "What is a black mayor? Could you invite the white mayor of Chicago?"
Inclusiveness was one of the main themes of Bradley's talk. He cautioned conference members to support policies that took everyone into consideration, not just their own group. "Ask yourself: are you organizing around principles that would be right in any conference you go to?" he said.
Many of Bradley's remarks focused on the importance of community building. Rather than fight majority culture and each other, Bradley said that people should do away with a philosophy of hate. He cited race-hate and hip-hop hate as two of the problems facing youth today.
"Your salvation is not so complicated. All you have to do is seek to create among yourselves love," he said.
Bradley added that, "If you're Latino and you take the life of another Latino … you're not a Latino, you're a gangster."
Problems which confront Compton, such as drugs, are not limited to minority communities, Bradley said. "While crack cocaine started in Compton, you've got white women in Connecticut [doing it now]. Desolation and poverty know no boundaries," he said.
Bradley described the rift between blacks and Latinos as artificial and unnecessary. For minorities to gain equal standing in society, they must first settle their internal problems, he said. "The quicker we can coalesce, the quicker we can do what's right," said Bradley. "We must begin to build bridges out of the flesh and blood of all of us. So it's not your bridge, it's not my bridge, it's our bridge. And that is the only way we can truly be Americans."
While Bradley did not deny the need for jails, he described prisons as an industry thriving on minorities. "The biggest business in America is not drugs, it's prisons," Bradley said. "The more prisons we make, the better the industry becomes."
Bradley said that many of the supporters of the three strikes initiative in California "owned the bricks that built the prisons. Three strikes, now a law, provides a mandatory life sentence for any person convicted of three felonies.
When Bradley became mayor, the odds of getting killed in Compton were 1 in 900, he said. The killing that stands out most for Bradley involved a Latino baby girl, who was hit by a bullet meant for two inter-racial couples. "[They] murdered a child before that child had an opportunity to know her full potential in life," he said. "Two people lost a child because two people were full of hate and they could not understand love."
Bradley focused on the importance of using history to understand the present. "As a student of Malcom X, I know that history above all else rewards our research," he said, focusing on the contributions Latinos have made to America since its earliest days.
Bradley encouraged the audience to be critical of the government and its actions. Because of his position and critical eye toward the government, Bradley described himself as "probably one of the ten most dangerous black men in America."
Rafael Trujillo, a senior at Yale University and the administrative chair of the ECCSF, enjoyed having Bradley address the conference. "It's always nice to have a speaker that can tie the Chicano Caucus to other communities and see how they interact," he said.
"Mayor Bradley's talk fit perfectly within the conference," Estrada added. "We were trying to strike a balance where theory met reality, where academics met practicality so to speak, and who else to address some of the societal ills that we as privileged Chicanos/Latinos claim we wish to erase than the mayor of Compton?"
"I think it was one of the best conferences that ECCSF members have attended in a long time," Estrada said.
The talk was sponsored by the Martin Luther King Lecture Fund and the Chicana/o Caucus.