More than 500 college students from five states will gather at NIU Saturday to discuss how to combat racism on their campuses.

“Racial Discrimination on Campus: Promoting Peer Initiatives and Student Action” will be the topic of the national one-day conference featuring Cherie Brown, founder of the Boston-based National Coalition Building Institute.

Don Buckner, special assistant to Barbara Henley, acting NIU student affairs vice president, said representatives from 52 Midwestern colleges will attend. About 60 colleges would have been represented, but interested students were turned away because of space constraints and the workshop format.

Buckner said about 150 NIU students will attend, representing various residence halls, fraternities, sororities, The Northern Star, the Student Association, the Black Greek Council, ROTC, the Black Student Union, and student workers at the Holmes Student Center and the Founders Memorial Library.

In response to a racist “White Power” flyer received by students in several residence halls Wednesday, Buckner said, “It’s just another example of why we’re having the conference.”

The flyer claimed “AIDS is a racial disease” and called for eliminating the observance of Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s birthday as a holiday. They were mailed to “resident” from Crusade Against Corruption, a white supremacist group in Georgia.

The flyer showed “how far we have to go in our society to combat racial discrimination. It’s a dramatic example,” he said.

The conference will feature three speakers: Silas Purnell, director of educational services at Ada S. McKinley Community Services in Chicago; Clarence Shelley, assistant vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana; and Jon Dalton, former NIU vice president for student affairs, who now holds the same position at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

A pre-conference event Friday night will include performances by the Black Theater Workshop, acting out racially discriminating scenes to help stimulate discussion.