By Garrett Mogge

For The Diamondback

A panel of professors, writers and experts on race urged University of Maryland students Wednesday to remember young people’s role in the history of the civil rights movement.

“I don’t think students realize how powerful they really are,” said Jason Nichols, a lecturer in this university’s African American studies department.

The event, named “A View from the Mountaintop: 50 Years Later,” was a town hall event hosted by this university’s African American studies department.

“You guys have the opportunity to move this beyond conversations,” Nichols said.

One panelist, Joe Madison, a prominent black rights activist and talk radio host, said student activists decades ago “were prepared to make the sacrifice in order to make concrete changes.”

[Read more: Civil rights activist Helena Hicks spoke at UMD about segregation and other racial issues]

“What is the difference between a moment and a movement?” said Madison. “Movements require sacrifice.”

While there have been improvements in equality for African Americans throughout American history there is still oppression today, said Favour Onuoha, a sophomore accounting and finance major.

“Walking around, you are being second-guessed, people judging you by your looks before you even speak,” Onuoha said.

Rashawn Ray, a sociology professor at this university, said much of the inequality that minorities face today was enumerated in the Kerner Report, a best-selling report commissioned in 1967 by President Lyndon Johnson, to investigate the cause of the decade’s race riots.

The report forecasted the racial fracturing of the United States and blamed the strife and violence in black communities on failed government services like economic and social programs.

The things that minorities are struggling with today, like economic inequality and broken education systems are “the same things that were put in that report and led to it being a bestseller,” Ray said.

[Read more: After a spike in hate bias incidents, UMD’s police chief spoke about how to cope]

The town hall event comes more than a year after the murder of 2nd Lt. Richard Collins, and dozens of hate bias incidents have been reported over the past several semesters.

The university announced this week it has created voluntary diversity training programs and an online log to track hate bias incidents on campus.

Imani Davis, a senior African American studies major, worried student movements can have problems once they become more mainstream and are adopted by administrators.

“The very people who started the movement and initiated the conversation are left out when it gets to the administration,” Davis said.

Chryl Laird, a professor of government and legal studies at Bowdoin College, suggested establishing clear goals and not necessarily simply raising “awareness,” to help the movements avoid losing momentum.

“They are still working within the system, and that system is very limiting,” said Stella Rouse, a government and politics professor at this university. “That leadership in African American and Latino communities needs come from the ground up.”