Honors and Awards

• The new Days-Massolo Center at Hamilton College honors Drew Days III, a 1963 graduate of the college. The center will house the college’s chief diversity office and the college’s women’s center.

Days, now a professor at Yale Law School, is the former solicitor general of the United States.

• Thomas Parker, president of the Service Employees International Union local at Princeton University, received the university’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day Journey Award for Lifetime Service. Parker received a plaque and an engraved wristwatch.

• The Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, under the direction of Bevlee Watford, received the 2010 Claire L. Felbinger Award for Diversity from the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology.

Dr. Watford holds bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees in engineering from Virginia Tech.

• The University of Louisville has honored the memory of its first black faculty member by establishing the Charles H. Parrish Jr. Achievement Award. The initial award was given to David Jones Sr., cofounder of Humana Inc., and his wife Betty.

Parrish, the son of a slave, taught at Louisville Municipal College for 20 years before it was absorbed into the University of Louisville. He was the only faculty member at the college who was retained when the merger took place in 1951.

Copyright © 2011. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.