Dean Davis was a visionary, with an illuminating understanding of the current realities and future needs for addressing race issues. While race conversations and presentations have grown exponentially in the past year, the CRSP speaker series that Dean Davis founded has provided a lively, popular forum on race topics for nearly two decades. To date, over 100 lectures have been held, and the CRSP speaker series archive is one of the richest on race research in the country thanks to Dean Davis’s foresight. As Dean Davis noted, his goal was to “Short circuit the distance between research and practice.” Indeed, the lunch and lecture format he developed was a huge success, one that fostered interdisciplinary collaborations, innovative ideas, and civic engagement.
