Harvard University recently dedicated a plaque in the Harvard Law School plaza to honor the slaves who created the wealth which enabled Isaac Royall Jr. to provide funds for the establishment of the law school in 1817. The Royall family generated wealth from the slave trade and the operation of a sugar plantation in Antigua.
Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey has renamed its College Avenue Apartments to honor Sojourner Truth. The library on the Livingston Campus in Piscataway has been renamed the James Dickson Carr Library after Rutgers’ first African-American graduate.
The collection showcases Black Americans through advertisements and political campaigns aimed at African Americans from the 1970s through the 1990s.
Rebecca Blank, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, stated that “it is time to take a fresh look at our history to ensure that we fully understand and appropriately acknowledge the activities of members of the campus community.”
Matthew Delmont, a professor of history and director of the School of Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies at Arizona State University, has received a Guggenheim Fellowship that will allow him to conduct research on how African American viewed World War II at the time the war was being waged.
The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, is commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the first Black residential students on campus by creating a mural that will be permanently displayed at the university’s Swen Library.
Dr. Andrew W. Kahrl is conducting research on how tax liens and tax sales became a tool used by predatory land speculators to acquire Black-owned land. Dr. Kahrl discovered that local officials assessed Black property owners at highly inflated rates in an effort to tax them off the land.
The University of South Carolina’s Center for Civil Rights History and Research held the inaugural South Carolina Civil Rights Teacher Initiative this summer.
In 1967 Dorothy J. Phillips became the first African American women to earn an undergraduate degree at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. The university has established a fellowship program and an endowed chair in her honor.
In 1950, Frederick Scott became the first African American to be awarded an undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
This past Sunday, Tuskegee University held a chapel service to honor John W. Whittaker, the educational institution’s first chaplain. The service was part of the Whittaker family reunion that took place on campus.
The University of Mississippi is commissioning a group of plaques that will explain in historical context why some buildings and structures were named after people who had ties to White supremacy.
A native of Chillicothe, Ohio, and a two-time graduate of Ohio University, Joseph Carter Corbin moved to Arkansas in 1872. Three years later he founded the Branch Normal College, which today is the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.
In 1939, Lucile Bluford, who was a graduate of the University of Kansas and an accomplished journalist, applied to and was accepted at the Missouri School of Journalism. When she arrived on campus she was not permitted to enroll due to the color of her skin.
The University of Arkansas has debuted a new online archive of materials relating to Southland College in Phillips County, Arkansas. The school was the first institution of higher learning for African Americans in the United States founded west of the Mississippi River.
The University of Virginia has discovered the names – sometimes only the first names – of nearly 1,000 slaves who worked on campus. The university believes that as many as 5,000 slaves may have labored on university grounds in the 1817-to-1865 period.
Maureen Elgersman Lee, an associate professor at Hampton University in Virginia, is leading a project that encourages African Americans to bring historical letters, documents, and other correspondence to the library where they are scanned and preserved in digital form.
The 44 African American men were the first African Americans other than cooks or porters to serve in modern era of the U.S. Navy. They were also the first African Americans to work at the university in occupations that did not involve cooking, cleaning, or laundry work.
In November 2015, construction workers building an expansion on Baldwin Hall on the campus of the University of Georgia discovered the remains of approximately 105 individuals. The vast majority of the persons buried at the site were determined to have had mothers who were of African heritage.
In January 1965, John Bradley became the first African American student at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro. Six other Black students entered the university in the fall of 1965. Catherine Davis, a sophomore transfer student, was the first African American student to be awarded a degree.
Fields Cook was born into slavery on a Virginia plantation in 1817. His “A Scetch of My Own Life by Fields Cook” is one of the few, if only, surviving manuscripts written before the Civil War by a slave still in bondage.
Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, will soon have a permanent exhibition space documenting the lives of Black students, faculty, and alumni at the university. Charla Wilson will join the staff at Northwestern University Libraries as the inaugural Archivist for the Black Experience.
Dr. Isrea Butler will direct the ensemble which is a recreation of the 369th Regimental Band that was made up of 65 African American and Puerto Rican soldiers that performed in the United States and in Europe during the World War I period a century ago.
Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, recently unveiled a bust of Edward McKnight Brawley, who in 1875 became the first African American to graduate from the university. He went on to serve as president of what is now Selma University in Alabama. Brawley also was president of Morris College in Alabama.
Gerald Gill taught history at Tufts University for 27 years before his death 10 years ago at the age of 59. Professor Gill was the author of “Another Light on the Hill,” which documented the history of African Americans at Tufts.
Yale University has announced the first cohort of 20 high school juniors who are the winners of the Bassett Award for Community Engagement. Bassett took classes at Yale in the 1850s and later was the first African American to be named a U.S. diplomat.
The map shows how the racial makeup of neighborhoods changed between 1990 and 2010. Users can zoom in to focus on a particular state, city, or even neighborhood. The maps are so detailed that information can be found for any 30-square-meter area in the country.
Recently, Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., held a ceremony to name a campus building to honor Anne Marie Becraft, who in 1820 founded a school for Black girls in Washington. At the time she founded the school, Becraft was 15 years old.
Charlayne Hunter-Gault and her husband Ron Gault have created the Giving Voice to the Voiceless endowment at the University of Georgia. The endowment will provide grants to university students to promote social justice and global understanding.
Peyton Skipwith, a former slave who quarried stone for some of the early structures on the Charlottesville campus, was owned by John Hartwell Cocke, one of the first members of the university’s board of visitors.
Early records of the university did not include information on a student’s race. By using yearbooks, class photos, and student newspapers, researchers have identified more than 1,700 Black students who attended the university from 1853 to 1970.
From 1966 to 1983, the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore published the literary magazine Chicory. The publication, financed by the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, contained poetry, prose, and artwork composed by members of Baltimore’s low-income, African American communities.
In 1972, police were called to campus of Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to remove Black student protestors from the president’s office. During the ensuing melee, two students were shot dead from shotgun blasts. No one was ever charged with the murders.
On April 18, several descendants of the slaves that were sold by the university in 1838 will come to Washington, D.C., for the ceremony to rename buildings that have honored university officials who participated in the slave trade.
North Carolina State University recently premiered a new documentary film that examines the history of African American speech, its cultural importance, and how African American speech has shaped modern American English.
The exhibit, “Bamboula! Black Music Before the Blues,” includes nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books, sheet music, concert posters, songbooks, and other artifacts. It will be shown at the university’s John Hay Library through May 5.
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