Higher Education Grants or Gifts of Interest to African Americans

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.

Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black educational institution in Texas, received a $300,000 donation from the estate of Tommie Walton, who earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial education at the university in 1953. A Korean War veteran, Walton had a long career at NASA. He died in 2019 at the age of 89. The funds will establish the Tommie Walton Endowed Scholarship, open to any students in good academic standing with financial need.

The University of Pittsburgh received a $350,000 grant from the Heinz Endowment to analyze disparities in the Allegheny County criminal justice system with an emphasis on racial discrimination. The grant was one of several initiatives from the foundation totaling $7 million aimed at increasing equality in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area.

The Georgetown-Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science, a multi-institutional consortium of medical research institutions, is the recent recipient of a five-year, $24.3 million grant from the National Center for Advancing Translational Science, a subsidy of the National Institutes of Health. Historically Black Howard University will receive approximately $1.23 million annually over the next five years to support the research efforts outlined in the grant. The grant will allow the center to continue developing and promoting innovative approaches to clinical research and translational science. Their efforts will expedite the translation of scienti!c advances in laboratories, clinical observations in healthcare facilities, and community-based research in the greater Washington D.C. region into interventions that improve the health of individuals and the general public.

Historically Black Delaware State University was awarded a five-year, $1,985,763 grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The funds will be used to support the creation of a training program to prepare students for Ph.D. programs and careers relating to biomedical research fields.

An anonymous donor has made a gift to Fayetteville State University, a historically Black educational institution in North Carolina, that will allow the university to give laptop computers to all first-year students. The donation was made in honor of the late Jacob Dixon Jr., a graduate of North Carolina A&T State University who spent 23 years in the U.S. Air Force before becoming a principal design engineer in space transportation systems at NASA.