College of William and Mary Renames Buildings That Honored Confederates or Segregationists
The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, has renamed three buildings and a department that currently honor supporters of the Confederacy or Jim Crow segregation. Two other buildings were renamed a year ago.
Website Will Track Racial Residential Segregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, Since 1957
The University of Arkansas at Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture is creating a map-based website that tracks how urban renewal changed the city of Little Rock in the decades following the Central High School desegregation crisis in 1957.
Three Virginia Community Colleges to Change Their Names
Three Virginia Community Colleges have a green light to change their names and two other colleges are being directed to consider doing likewise after the State Board for Community Colleges voted unanimously to amend its community college naming policy.
Western Kentucky University Honors its First Black Student
The board of regents at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, has approved the renaming of Northeast Hall to Munday Hall. The change honors Margaret Munday, the first African American student to enroll at the institution. Munday Hall will be the first building on campus named after an African American.
Bowdoin College in Maine Has Established Four Endowed Chairs to Honor Black Alumni
Bowdoin College, the highly rated liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine, has announced the creation of four new endowed faculty professorships that honor distinguished Black graduates of the college. The four new chairs will honor Matthew D. Branche, Iris W. Davis. Rasuli Lewis, and Frederic Morrow.
Yale University to Build a Memorial to Recognize Enslaved People Who Worked on Campus
Research by the Yale and Slavery Working Group found that enslaved people worked on the construction of Connecticut Hall on campus and that many leading figures associated with the early eras of the university held enslaved people.
Yale University Acquires a Collection of Gordon Parks’ Photographs
Gordon Parks was a true renaissance man. In addition to a long career as a photographer, he was a composer, musician, author, and filmmaker.
Yale Divinity Schools Examines Its Ties to Slavery and Begins to Make Amends
Yale Divinity School recently acknowledged its historical complicity in slavery and racism. It is allocating $20 million to fund 10 social justice scholarships each year for incoming students who are dedicated to social justice work.
One of the Earliest Schools for Black Americans to Become Part of Colonial Williamsburg
Last fall, the College of William and Mary and Colonial Williamsburg announced that they had verified that a building on the college's campus, which was built in 1760, was the home of the Bray School where both enslaved and free Black children were educated in the eighteenth century. The college sold the building to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
The First Building on the Campus of the University of South Carolina Named for...
During the Reconstruction period, Celia Dial Saxon was one of the first African American students to attend South Carolina College, later the University of South Carolina. She taught school in Columbia, South Carolina for 57 years.
The University of Tennessee Acquires the Personal Archives of Artist Beauford Delaney
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Libraries has acquired the complete personal archive of internationally renowned modernist painter Beauford Delaney (1901–1979). Delaney was a member of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the leading modernist painters of his time.
New Cornell University Fellowship Honors The First Black Student to Earn a Ph.D. in...
The Thomas Wyatt Turner Fellowship will support up to 10 graduate students from 1890 institutions, which are historically Black colleges and universities that are land-grant universities. They will spend the 2022-23 academic year on the Cornell University campus.
New Scholarship Honors the First Black Woman Graduate of Yale Divinity School
A new scholarship at Yale Divinity School honors Rena Karefa-Smart, the first Black woman to graduate from the school. Dr. Karefa-Smart was also the first Black woman to earn a theology doctorate from Harvard Divinity School and the first female professor to earn tenure at the Howard University School of Divinity.
North Carolina A&T Acquires the The Justice Henry E. and Shirley T. Frye Archival...
Shirley Frye was a longtime administrator at North Carolina A&T State University and nearby Bennett College. Henry Frye was a district attorney, legislator, judge, and chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.
College of William and Mary Dedicates a Memorial to the Enslaved Who Worked on...
The memorial resembles a fireplace hearth and is meant to symbolize both a place of community and the center of domestic enslavement. A vessel to hold fire that will burn on special occasions will be installed at the center of the Hearth at a later date.
The First Black Woman to Graduate From Arizona State University
For many years, it was believed that Love Hatton Jordan was the first African American woman to graduate from Arizona State University in 1928. Now an earlier Black woman graduate has been discovered. Stella McHenry graduated in 1925 and became a school teacher. She died three years later.
How Education May Play a Role in Reparations for Black Californians
“Without accountability, there is no justice. For too long, our nation has ignored the harms that have been — and continue to be — inflicted on African Americans in California and across the country,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta.
University of Michigan to Examine Its History Relating to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
The University of Michigan is set to begin a multifaceted, years-long project to study, document, and better understand the university’s history with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusion — with the history of race and racism as its first major focus.
Eastern Illinois University Renames a Residence Hall to Honor Two African Americans
Zella Powell is believed to be the university’s first Black graduate, earning a degree from Eastern State Normal School in 1910. Ona Norton was the matriarch of a Black family in Charleston, Illinois, who housed Black student athletes in the 1950s who were not permitted to live on campus.
Prairie View A&M University Seeks to Rediscover Its Lost History
Prairie View A&M University is located on land that once was a plantation that housed 400 enslaved individuals. Many of the historically Black university's historical records were lost in a 1947 fire. Now a new committee has been formed to piece together the university's past.
University of Michigan Compiles a Vast Database of Its Early Black Students
A new public database of African American students created by the University of Michigan documents students who attended the university between 1817 and as recently as 1970. The database contains information on nearly 6,000 African American students.
University of Richmond Changes Name of Its Law School Due to Benefactor’s Ties to...
The T.C. Williams School of Law will now be known as the University of Richmond School of Law. Williams was a student and later a trustee of the then-named Richmond College. He personally enslaved three individuals and his business enslaved dozens more.
Western Kentucky University Honors Its First Black Student
Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green has renamed a campus building to honor its first Black graduate. A residence hall on campus now bears the name of Margaret Munday, who was the first Black student to enroll at the university in 1956 and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in music and elementary education in 1960.
Georgetown Creates New Fund to Benefit Descendants of People Enslaved by the University
The Reconciliation Fund has begun accepting applications for projects that aim to benefit communities of the descendants of people enslaved and sold by the university, many of whom live in and around Maringouin, Louisiana, where their ancestors were sold and forcibly moved to in 1838. The university plans to allocate $400,000 annually to the effort.
University of Kentucky Has Allocated Funds to Remove Controversial Mural From Memorial Hall
During the Great Depression, Ann Rice O’Hanlon painted a 38 feet wide, 11 feet tall mural on Kentucky history in the University of Kentucky’s Memorial Hall. The mural depicted enslaved African Americans hunched in a field, Black musicians playing for White dancers, and a Native American threatening a White settler with a tomahawk.
The University Consortium on Afro-Latin American Studies Will Examine Western Hemisphere Slavery
Of the 10.7 million Africans who survived the Middle Passage, 4.9 million were taken to Brazil, another 1 million arrived in Jamaica, and millions more were taken to various islands in the Caribbean. A new collaboration between Harvard University, the University of Pittsburgh and four universities in Latin America will study slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Four African Americans Receive Significant Honors From Louisiana State University
The School of Education and the Graduate School will be renamed to honor African Americans students who broke racial barriers at the university. The Design Building is being renamed for the university's first Black professor.
East Tennessee State University Has Digitized a Collection of Black History in Appalachia
The Langston Heritage Group Collection includes a wealth of historical information about Black churches, schools, civic clubs, and organizations throughout Washington County, Tennessee from the end of the Civil War to the present. It was donated to the university in 2000 but has now been digitized and made available to researchers and the public.
College of William and Mary to Digitize Records of Early African American Churches
The Special Collections Research Center of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, has partnered with several Black churches in Williamsburg to add their church records to the library’s special collections. One is the First Baptist Church, one of the country’s earliest African-American congregations that was founded by free and enslaved African Americans in 1776.
Columbia University to Acquire the Archives of Composer and Educator Tania León
The Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University in New York has announced that it will acquire the archives of Tania León, the noted composer, conductor, and educator. Her orchestral work Stride, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic in celebration of the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music.
Pomona College Receives the Personal Archives of Myrlie Evers-Williams
The collection, containing thousands of items focuses on her life after moving to California in 1964 after the assassination of her husband Medgar Evers. The Mississippi state archives are home to the Medgar Wiley and Myrlie Beasley Evers Papers, covering their early years in that state.
Rice University to Relocate Statue of Its White Supremacist Founder
The board of trustees of Rice University has decided the statue of William Marsh Rice will no longer be at the center of the Academic Quadrangle and will be presented with historical context and information about the university’s founder, including his ownership of enslaved people.
A Photograph Is Discovered of the First Black Graduate of Yale College
For many years, it was believed that Edward Bouchet was the first Black graduate of Yale College in 1874. But nine years ago, new research discovered that Richard Henry Greene of the Class of 1857 was the first Black graduate. Now a photograph of Dr. Greene has been discovered.
Scholars Enhance FBI Photographs From Bloody Sunday
Photographs taken by FBI photographers from the ground and in surveillance aircraft were declassified in 2015, but have never been enlarged and enhanced via hi-resolution scans until now. A major question is why these photographs remained classified for 50 years.
Bryn Mawr College Removes the Name of Its Racist Former President From Its Library...
Martha Carey Thomas was the second president of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She was a graduate of Cornell University and earned a Ph.D....
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Acquires Massive Photographic Archival of Black History
The Roland L. Freeman Collection is a massive compilation of assignment and project work from a career that spans more than 50 years of documenting Black communities, public figures, and folk art and artisans. It consists of nearly 24,000 slides, 10,000 photographic prints, 400,000 negatives, and 9,000 contact sheets.
