Professor and policeman to join Obama at picnic table peace talks: CS Monitor

Quoted via Christian Science Monitor:

On Thursday afternoon, Barack Obama will sit down at a picnic table outside the Oval Office and attempt to lower tensions between Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge, Mass., Police Department .

The goal of the gathering on the White House South Lawn, says presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs, is “to continue to take the temperature down a bit” in the discussion of race relations in the US triggered by Crowley’s arrest of Gates after an investigation into a suspected burglary at the professor’s home.

President Obama added fuel to the debate on race relations when he told a press conference last week that the Cambridge police had “acted stupidly” for arresting Gates when it was clear the home he broke into was his own. more