Here is this week’s news of grants to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
Morris Brown College, the historically Black educational institution in Atlanta, received a three-year, $900,000 grant from the U.S. Health Services Administration for initiatives to reduce HIV infection among young African American adults in Atlanta. The programs will include seminars that focus on reducing drug and alcohol abuse that can lead to risky sexual behavior.
Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, received a $725,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to modernize the technological foundations of The HistoryMakers oral history project. Juliesanna Richardson, an alumna of Brandeis University and Harvard Law School, started The HistoryMakers project in 1999. To date she has recorded 2,700 oral history videos totaling more than 9,000 hours. The project, will make improvements to the video’s collection’s web platform. Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh will also participate in the grant project.
Historically Black Tuskegee University in Alabama received a $100,000 donation from alumnus Lonnie Jackson that will be earmarked to make improvements to laboratories in the College of Engineering. Jackson, the inventor of the “Super-Soaker” toy and current CEO of Johnson Research and Development in Atlanta, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering at Tuskegee. He has worked for the U.S. Air Force and NASA and holds more than 80 U.S. patents.
Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire received a $141,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop plans to identify, recruit, and retain faculty members from underrepresented groups. The grant will fund visits to campus by minority doctoral students who Dartmouth seeks to hire to its faculty.
Benedict College, a historically Black educational institution in Columbia, South Carolina, received a $100,000 donation from Dr. Kapauner Lewis, an anesthesiologist in Louisville, Kentucky. The gift will endow a scholarship fund in honor of Dr. Lewis’ father, a 1969 alumnus of Benedict College. The scholarships will be earmarked for students in STEM fields with a grade point average of 3.0 or higher. Kapauner Lewis is a graduate of the University of South Carolina and Duke Medical.
