Barnard College, the highly rated liberal arts educational institution for women in New York City, has elevated its African Studies Program to a full academic department.
The Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Center at the University of Kentucky has been renamed the Martin Luther King Center and has revamped its mission to the university.
The first artist-in-residence will be saxophonist Antonio Hart. He is a graduate of the Berklee College of Music and is a professor at Queens College, a campus of the City University of New York system.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., who has led the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for more than 20 years, was named the founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.
A survey of 1,777 colleges and universities found that 76 percent of these institutions had Black studies programs to some degree. Some 20 percent of responding institutions had formal academic units, either departments or programs, dedicated to African American studies.
The fellows are housed within departments in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State and conduct research on or related to Africa or the African diaspora. Each fellow is matched with a mentor on the Penn State faculty.
Gibor Basri, vice chancellor of equity and inclusion at Berkeley, stated that the main purpose of these programs is "to provide a place where students in these populations can find community and a safe space to talk about the challenges of being in that particular community."
Adrienne Walker Hoard has been serving as professor of art and art education at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She previously taught at Ohio State University and Louisiana State University.
The Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of South Florida in Tampa, is undertaking an effort to obtain funding to hold a major training institute for African descendants in Latin America who are working for civil rights.
The Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at Oregon State University in Corvallis is getting a new home. The original building is being moved to a community garden in the city and a new structure will be built at the current site.
Alex Carter, a Ph.D student at the University of Massachusetts, will spend a full year in Australia, beginning in August, working with the Performance Research Unit and the Indigenous Centre at Monash University in Clayton, Victoria, near Melbourne. His research will also take him to Sydney, Brisbane, and Canberra.
Fifty years ago, students from historically Black Tougaloo College staged a sit-in at a lunchcounter in a Woolworth’s store in Jackson, Mississippi. The students were beaten by a White mob. Now a historic marker has been placed at the site of the old Woolworth's store.
Under the partnership Bethune-Cookman University, the historically Black educational institution in Daytona Beach, Florida, will become the research arm of the League of Black Women Global Leadership Research Institute.
The new, state-of-the-art African American Cultural Center will provide a meeting and conference space, access to a cultural library, a cultural and artifact tour, internet and wireless access and equipment rental. The center hosts a number of events and programs each year.
This June eight college juniors from across the nation will participate in the African American Literatures and Cultures Institute at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Under the proposed legislation, only courses that present a "comprehensive survey" of American or Texas history could be used to meet the six-credit history requirement for all bachelor's degree recipients at state universities.
The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., a leading figure in the civil rights movement and an associate of Martin Luther King Jr., has donated a significant portion of his papers to the special collections division of the Vanderbilt University Libraries.
The University of Florida in Gainesville has offered a program in African American studies for the past 45 years but until now students could not major in the discipline.
Among the items donated to the university are a bronze casting of the head of a queen mother from Benin, a helmet mask made of wood and human hair from Tanzania, and a Kente cloth used by members of the royal court of the Ashanti people of Ghana.
Scholars at the University of South Carolina are establishing an archive documenting the history of the civil rights movement in South Carolina. The project is made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.