Since taking over Fisk University's Race Relations Institute two years ago, Dr. Raymond Winbush has been aggressive about revitalizing the once-prominent institute and resuscitating its showpiece -- an annual summer seminar which died sixteen years ago.

When former Fisk President Henry Ponder lured Winbush from his post as professor and director of the Black Cultural Center at Vanderbilt University, Fisk's institute had no director, no budget and few programs. Today, bolstered by more than $4 million in private and corporate grants and the renewed commitment from Fisk officials, the fifty-five-year-old institute is making a comeback.

Winbush is euphoric about the resurrection of the institute and mesmerized by the thought of unleashing it onto a society he says is more racially hostile than when it began. In 1942, the United States was allied with most of Europe in an attempt to dismantle Adolph Hitler's Nazi regime and its racial-superiority philosophy. That was the same year that Charles Spurgeon Johnson, Fisk's first African American president, created the Race Relations Institute to address divisions among racial, religious and ethnic groups.

The Tennessee campus--which once courted Fannie Lou Hamer, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph and Hubert Humphrey--will convene the institute's thirty-fourth conference July 8-13, the first major conference since 1983.

"We're inviting a lot of people," Winbush boasts.

Among the 300 people invited are: President Bill Clinton; Ralph Reed, former president of the Christian Coalition; Harry Allen, a member of the rap group Public Enemy; Lerone Bennett Jr., editor of Ebony Magazine, and 1996 Republican presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan.

"We want them to come to Fisk to discuss America's most troubling problem -- which is race -- just the way Johnson did it," says Winbush.

Decades ago, according to Winbush, "People were heating a path to the door of the Race Relations Institute." For three weeks, talks among whites, Blacks, Jews, preachers, politicians, parents, scientists, students and others dominated the days. Picnics on the lawn filled the nights Race was on everyone's lips