Honors and Awards

• Barbara Jordan, the first black woman to be elected to the Texas Senate, will be honored later this month with the dedication of a statue on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. It will be the first statue of a woman on campus grounds.

Jordan went on to serve three terms in Congress. She gave a passionate speech defending the U.S. Constitution during the impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon in 1974. In 1976 she delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention that nominated Jimmy Carter.

Due to health reasons, she gave up her seat in Congress and took a faculty position at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. Jordan died in 1996 at the age of 59.

• Kwame Dawes, Louise Fry Scudder Professor at the University of South Carolina, was inducted into the South Carolina State Library’s Literary Hall of Fame. A native of Ghana and a celebrated poet, Dawes earned a Ph.D. at the University of New Brunswick.

• Maria White, assistant dean of students and director of the Richard Holmes Cultural Diversity Center at Mississippi State University, received the 2009 MSU Diversity Award for her “significant commitment to enhancing diversity and cross-cultural understanding.”

• Hana Stith, president of the African/African American Historical Society and curator of the African/African American Historical Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, received the Jasmine Robinson Pioneer Award from the Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

Copyright © 2009. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.