Anita Hill Visits Detroit on Book Tour & Speaks at Fundraiser

By Karen Hudson Samuels/Tell Us Detroit

DETROIT - Famed attorney Anita Hill is visiting Detroit on a two-fold mission: To promote her new book, "Reimaging Equality: Stories of Gender, Race and Finding Home” and to support the Detroit International Academy of Young Women.

Hill was the featured speaker at Motor City Casino’s Sound Board Thursday evening at a fundraiser for “Anita’s Aspiring Attorneys”, a group established by Detroit International Academy for Young Women’s Principal, Beverly Hibbler.

Hibbler says hearing of Anita Hill’s plans to appear in Detroit was a catalyst for starting the club for young women interested in pursuing careers in the legal profession. It also dovetailed with Hill’s interest in visiting a high school during her book tour stop-over in Detroit; she will visit the Academy today and speak to students during a special assembly.

In all 23 students are part of the AAA club and they have prepared for Anita Hill’s visit by reading her book “Speak Truth to Power”. The Detroit International Academy of Young Women is an all female school with a college preparatory curriculum and a minimum 2.0 grade-point average required for admission.

Anita Hill gained national attention twenty years ago during the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; she alleged he made sexually harassing gestures and statements aimed at her.

Today Hill is a law professor and teacher of social policy along with women's studies at Brandies University. Principal Hibbler is hoping her club of Anita’s Aspiring Attorneys can make a trip to the school in the spring.

"Reimaging Equality: Stories of Gender, Race and Finding Home”

To understand Anita’s Hill’s concept of reimaging equality, one need only read a passage from the book’s introduction. Hill writes, “For me, home is inextricably linked to the story of how my family in one generation, went from being property to owning property.”

Examining equality through the lens of homeownership, the bedrock of the American Dream, is a fresh perspective. Hill writes of home as a powerful symbol of gender and race advancement.

A history of discrimination, redlining and more recently the mortgage crisis have been roadblocks for many on path to homeownership, these realities are woven into stories Hill tells in a writing style that is both eloquent and thought provoking.

The meaning of home as more than a place of shelter challenges is a 21st century take on homeownership as part of our identity and roots in an inclusive democracy.