Spelman College President Beverly Tatum was born in 1954, the year the U.S. Supreme Court struck down legal school segregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case.

“I’m an integration baby, and the decision has shaped my life from the beginning,” said Tatum, who received two psychology degrees from U-M and is the author of “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race.”

Members of the University community have read thousands of copies of the book as part of Ann Arbor Reads/Ypsilanti Reads.

Gary Orfield, co-director of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, joined Tatum March 25 at Rackham Auditorium to discuss school desegregation in the 21st century, one in a series of events marking the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. The landmark Supreme Court ruling is being celebrated and studied as part of a special theme semester.

Tatum, who attended integrated schools and universities, is president of Spelman, a college created to serve an all-Black, all-female student body. Asked what she thinks of proposals for similar schools at the middle school level, she said it depends on the individual situation.

“College choice is a reflection of identity, how you see yourself. And I’ve had [Spelman] students tell me, ‘It makes me happy to know this place was built for me.’ Whether you’re at Spelman, which was built for Black women, or at a racially diverse but predominantly white campus like U-M, you want that sense of identity.”

Tatum said there are an ABCs to improving relations on campuses:

• Affirming identity by developing a curriculum, faculty and campus where all individuals feel comfortable being themselves and have the chance to associate with others who are like them. She recalled working in Boston when minority scores were very low in an integrated school but improved dramatically when the minority students were put in the same homeroom, giving them a chance to be together as a group with similar experiences but also to be part of the bigger integrated group;

• Building a community. All students need to feel they are part of the larger community in and out of school. Tatum said if she took a photo of the audience and gave everyone a copy, the first thing people would do is look to see if they could find themselves in the picture. The same thing happens in a diverse community, with everyone trying to find his or her own place within it, she said;

• Cultivating leadership. The ability to interact with people from different backgrounds is essential for any leader, she said.

Law School Dean Evan Caminker said Orfield is the kind of researcher who sees the important issues and immediately researches them, coming up with findings just as other researchers are only starting to ask the questions.

He pointed to Orfield’s recent work showing school segregation and minority drop-out rates rising since the early 1990s.

Orfield noted the number of white students enrolled in U.S. schools has dropped by 7 million nationally during the past decade, while the number of Latino students has grown by 7 million and the number of African American students by 1.5 million. This, she said, has made all educational institutions, and the nation as a whole, far more diverse.

Orfield said among the best things about federal No Child Left Behind legislation are provisions calling for the annual measurement of progress made by students, breaking that information down by race and gender to see what sort of progress really is being made.

“Desegregation is getting people together in the same room, but integration is getting them into each other’s hearts,” Orfield said.