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.
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore received a 44.4 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a program entitled “Inheritance Baltimore: Humanities and Arts Education for Black Liberation.” The project will focus on three goals:
- Researching and chronicling the history of the Black community in Baltimore and of the impact of racism on academic disciplines in higher education and at Johns Hopkins.
- Expanding the Baltimore Africana Archives Initiative that launched two years ago to offer Johns Hopkins scholars opportunities to take their research to the city’s Black churches and communities and to preserve archives in jeopardy of being lost.
- Developing a doctoral curriculum that incorporates city residents who are experts in local history to advance Black freedom education already underway in the city, and to develop a professional pipeline of Johns Hopkins Ph.D. students and future faculty who are trained to combat racism in American institutions, including at universities.
Historically Black Prairie View A&M University in Texas received a $1 million donation from Halliburton Inc. The funds will establish the Halliburton Business and Engineering Scholarship Fund. The scholarships will be for juniors and seniors who are majoring in accounting, management information systems, finance, and engineering. Eight students will receive $12,500 scholarships in the first year, and Halliburton will add on 16 additional scholarships for the same amount during the next four years.
The University of California, Berkeley received a $2.8 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The three-year-long project – called the Black Studies Collaboratory – aims to take Black studies research outside of the classroom and into the local community and greater public discourse. Led by Berkeley African American Studies scholars Leigh Raiford and Tianna S. Paschel, the project will organize academic think tanks, provide summer labs for graduate students, and award research grants for African American studies faculty and students that will increase the scope and impact of the department’s scholarship.
