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.
Marian Spencer served as vice mayor of Cincinnati and was a major force in the effort to desegregate the city’s public schools. Her late husband Donald was one of the first African American realtors in the city. Both Spencers graduated from the University of Cincinnati.
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the first jazz recording, Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, has established a YouTube channel where it will share oral history interviews from its extensive Jazz Archive.
The class “Southern Memory: Lynchings in the South,” examined the history and legal environment that led to more than 4,000 lynchings of African Americans. Then each student was assigned to research and document the particular case of one lynching victim.
Brooks, who died in 2000, was the former poet laureate of the state of Illinois and in 1950 was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize. The University of Chicago is holding a major celebration of her life and works on the 100th anniversary of her birth.
The research includes information on 12 segregated Carnegie libraries (or “Carnegie Negro Libraries” as they were called then), a group of public libraries that opened between 1900 and 1925.
The university’s “Documenting the African American Experience in Las Vegas” project, included a documentary film, the formation of an advisory board, the collection of oral histories and materials, and the creation of a digital portal to provide online access to the project’s materials.
The three-week seminar, entitled “Teaching the Long Hot Summer of 1967 and Beyond,” will allow 30 high school teachers to develop lesson plans for teaching about this period of civil rights history.
In 1932 a residential college at Yale University was named for John C. Calhoun, a former vice president of the United States, Yale alumnus, and proponent of slavery. The university has now decided to remove his name from the college.
Tuskegee University, the historically Black educational institution in Alabama, has announced that is has digitized several important audio recordings from its university archives including speeches by Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Muhammed Ali.
The collection includes 645 images, spanning the years from 1860 to the 1960s. Most of the photographs are images of everyday life in the African American community.
James Clark McReynolds was attorney general of the United States and then sat of the U.S. Supreme Court for 27 years. He refused to have Blacks or women as clerks and reportedly left the courtroom when the justices were addressed by Black or women attorneys.
The department of transportation in North Carolina plans to have stretches of interstate highways in the state named for Julius L. Chambers, who was chancellor of North Carolina Central University, and John Hope Franklin, the noted historian who was a long-time professor at Duke University.
Deady Hall is named after Matthew Deady, a legislator, university regent, and federal judge, who was a supporter of the institution of slavery. The renaming of the building was included in a set of 13 demands made by the Black Student Task Force in the fall of 2015.
The West Virginia and Regional History Center at West Virginia University is seeking copies of three African American newspapers that were published in Huntington, West Virginia, in the early twentieth century. There are no known copies of these newspapers.
Columbia University in New York City has debuted a new website that details not only the university’s involvement in slavery since its founding in as King’s College 1754 but also efforts by those at the university to abolish it.
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