The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia was established in 1981. Now, 36 years later it has been granted departmental status allowing it to function autonomously to develop curriculum and hire faculty.
The University of Pennsylvania has announced the first cohort of Calvin Bland Fellows. The fellows, all members of the university’s faculty, will conduct research on boys and young men of color. Two of the three new Calvin Bland fellows are African Americans.
The Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois has acquired the papers of poet Haki Madhubuti and the archives of the Third World Press, the oldest independent Black-owned publisher in the United States.
Under the initiative, the Divinity School will bring scholars, students, activists and public servants to Nashville for the next three years to work through the collaborative on programs to eradicate racism and all of its reciprocal forms of injustice and hatred.
The journal Transition was founded in 1961 in Kampala, Uganda, and became an important voice of Black intellectual thought as the continent transitioned from colonial rule to independence. For the past quarter century, the journal has been housed at Harvard University.
The major has four interdisciplinary core classes, including a capstone/senior thesis course, along with various electives. Faculty members from affiliated programs will offer a host of other courses that students can take to fulfill additional major and elective requirements.
Tobin Miller Shearer, an associate history professor and director of the African American studies program at the University of Montana, is about to embark on a 500-mile bicycle trip through the mountains of Montana in an effort to raise awareness of issues important to African Americans.
The African-American studies program at the University of Montana is the third oldest in the nation and will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2018. But until now, students could not major in the subject.
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.
According to the university, lawyers today cannot fully understand the American legal landscape without studying the relationship between race, ethnicity, and economic inequality.
The new Black Cultural Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will serve as a venue for programming, community organizing, and academic activities related to Black culture.
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.
Oberlin College, the highly rated liberal arts educational institution in Ohio, recently dedicated a new African art installation at its Allen Memorial Art Museum. The museum has 107 African art objects in its collection.
The Rose Bente Lee Ostapenko Center for Race, Equality and Mission will be focused on research and integrating issues of race and equality into the teaching/learning environment at Niagara University.
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.
The goal of the clinic is to bring cases that have the potential to provide real and concrete relief to large groups of people who have been harmed by discrimination or deprivation of protected rights.
Dr. Camara has been serving as associate vice president for academics, speaker of the Faculty Senate, and director of the McNair Scholars Program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.
The Laura and James J. Ross Gallery of African Art includes more than 250 items spanning more than 3,000 years of African history. Items include sculptures, ceramics, masks, ivory carvings, and metal works.
In the fall of 2015, the Black Student Task Force at the University of Oregon issued 13 demands designed to make the campus more welcoming to African American students. One of these demands was to build a Black Cultural Center on campus. Efforts are underway to meet that demand.
The new Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies program at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth will explore issues of race and ethnicity as active social, political, historical, and cultural processes.
The university has hired Shaun R. Harper to lead the new initiative and to serve as the Clifford and Betty Allen Professor in Urban Leadership. Currently, Professor Harper is the director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity at the University of Pennsylvania.
The University of Minnesota Libraries’ Umbra Search African American History website offer users access to more than 400,000 digitized archival materials documenting African American history from more than 1,000 libraries and cultural organizations.
The online bilingual archive is called the First Blacks in the Americas/Los Primeros Negros en las Americas. It documents the earliest history of the African diaspora in what is now the Dominican Republic.
The new minor at the highly rated women’s college, where Blacks make up 5 percent of the student body, will allow students to create a structured yet individualized plan of study from interdisciplinary courses that offer rigorous and complementary approaches to understanding race and ethnicity.
As a full department, African and African American studies will be better positioned to set curriculum and drive hiring decisions. Gerald Early, the Merle King Professor of Modern Letters, will serve as the inaugural chair of the new department.
The archive, “To See Justice Done: Letters from the Scottsboro Trials,” includes thousands of letters, documents, petitions, and telegrams that were sent to Alabama governors during the legal proceedings.
Courses in the new minor will be offered by several departments including history, sociology, literature, political science, law, communication and education. Students can choose from two tracks. One will focus on African American history and culture and the other will focus on the African diaspora.
Sylvester Magee died in Columbia, Mississippi, in 1971. He claimed he was born a slave in 1841 and after securing his freedom was a soldier in the Union Army during the Civil War. If true, the 130-year-old Sylvester Magee was not only the last surviving American slave, he was the last living Civil War veteran.
Charles L. Blockson, the curator emeritus of the Afro-American Collection at Temple University in Philadelphia, led an effort to commemorate the lives of enslaved Africans who labored in Pennsylvania or who were transported through Philadelphia on their way to southern plantations.
The new center will be named after Fannie Lou Hamer, the voting and civil rights activist. The agreement to establish the center comes after a year of talks among the administration, the Black Student Union and other campus African American groups.
Only 5 percent of Emory’s African art collection can be displaced at one time. The refurbished galleries allow museum officials to easily change exhibits, allowing for more of the university’s vast collection of African art to be seen by museum visitors.
Louis Harrison and Anthony Brown of the University of Texas at Austin have created The Black Male Education Research Collection. The new website is a repository of research on issues relating to Black men in all levels of education, with a special emphasis on higher education.
Western Illinois University in Macomb has announced that is eliminating several degree programs due to low number of students pursing bachelor’s degrees in these fields. One of the degree program being eliminated is African American studies. Blacks make up 19 percent of the undergraduate student body at the university.
Scholars at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, have debuted an interactive website that chronicles what is believed to be among the earliest examples of the music of the African diaspora.
Professor Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities Emerita and the 1993 Nobel Prize winner for literature. She joined the faculty at Princeton in 1989 and taught creative writing classes until 2006.
The residential community will be housed in the university’s Living Learning Center. The space set aside for the Umoja Pan-African Scholars community can house up to 80 students.
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