Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
The Charles Chestnutt Digital Archive at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School in New York City has received a $292,627 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The funds will support expanding the archive’s materials, making it more accessible to the public, and bringing it up-to-date with today’s digital archive standards. Charles Chestnutt was an African-American author whose novels explored racial and social identity in the antebellum South. His archive at Eugene Lang contains more than 60 pieces of his work and more than 300 reviews 0f these works.
A collaboration between historically black Morgan State University in Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University, Binghamton University, and the State University of New York has received a $30 million, five-year grant to launch a program with the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. The Professional Research Experience Program will provide students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty from the four schools with research opportunities at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work has received a $4.87 million grant from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration to provide community-based and family-centered services and health education to residents in the 10 Houston-area ZIP codes with the highest rates of death and complications surrounding birth. The initiative aims to reduce the racial disparities in maternal and infant mortality rates. In some areas of Harris County, Texas, these death rates are nearly five times the national average, with Black women and their babies at the greatest risk.
The department of history, political science, religion, and philosophy at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to plan an interpretive exhibition titled “Journey to Sanctuary: The Philadelphia Story of Faith and Transformation in the Second Great Migration of African-Americans from the South.” The new exhibit will tell the story of valiant African Americans who ventured north to Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley area in search of greater freedoms and economic opportunities during the mid-20th century.
The Thurgood Marshall College Fund and Hennessy have launched the Hennessy Fellows Program, a $10 million graduate scholarship program for students from historically Black colleges and universities. The program will select a cohort of ten students who receive personal mentoring, tuition assistance, a $10,000 annual stipend, and research, training, and networking opportunities.
The University of Georgia Research Foundation has received a $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of State to reduce the prevalence of human trafficking in targeted communities of West Africa. Over the next five years, the Africa Programing and Research Initiative to End Slavery effort will collect data on the prevalence of human trafficking in parts of Sierra Leone and Guinea. The baseline research will support programs that seek to achieve a measurable reduction of modern slavery. If successful, the program’s methodology could serve as a model for similar efforts elsewhere.
