University of California, Merced Debuts New Major in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
The major has four interdisciplinary core classes, including a capstone/senior thesis course, along with various electives. Faculty members from affiliated programs will offer a host of other courses that students can take to fulfill additional major and elective requirements.
University of Montana Black Studies Scholar Looks to Raise Awareness With 500-Mile Bike Trek
Tobin Miller Shearer, an associate history professor and director of the African American studies program at the University of Montana, is about to embark on a 500-mile bicycle trip through the mountains of Montana in an effort to raise awareness of issues important to African Americans.
University of Montana Graduates Its First African American Studies Majors
The African-American studies program at the University of Montana is the third oldest in the nation and will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2018. But until now, students could not major in the subject.
University of Cincinnati Researchers Produce a Racial Diversity Map of the Entire Nation
The map shows how the racial makeup of neighborhoods changed between 1990 and 2010. Users can zoom in to focus on a particular state, city, or even neighborhood. The maps are so detailed that information can be found for any 30-square-meter area in the country.
The New Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at New York University
According to the university, lawyers today cannot fully understand the American legal landscape without studying the relationship between race, ethnicity, and economic inequality.
New Black Cultural Center Dedicated at the University of Wisconsin
The new Black Cultural Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will serve as a venue for programming, community organizing, and academic activities related to Black culture.
Hamilton College’s Oral Histories of Jazz Greats Made Available Online
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the first jazz recording, Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, has established a YouTube channel where it will share oral history interviews from its extensive Jazz Archive.
A New African Art Exhibition at Oberlin College in Ohio
Oberlin College, the highly rated liberal arts educational institution in Ohio, recently dedicated a new African art installation at its Allen Memorial Art Museum. The museum has 107 African art objects in its collection.
Niagara University Establishes a New Center on Race and Equality
The Rose Bente Lee Ostapenko Center for Race, Equality and Mission will be focused on research and integrating issues of race and equality into the teaching/learning environment at Niagara University.
University of Kansas to Develop Curriculum for Teaching About the 1967 Riots
The three-week seminar, entitled "Teaching the Long Hot Summer of 1967 and Beyond," will allow 30 high school teachers to develop lesson plans for teaching about this period of civil rights history.
University of Virginia Law Students Participate in Pro Bono Civil Rights Law Clinic
The goal of the clinic is to bring cases that have the potential to provide real and concrete relief to large groups of people who have been harmed by discrimination or deprivation of protected rights.
Mohamed Camara to Chair the Department of Africana Studies at Howard University
Dr. Camara has been serving as associate vice president for academics, speaker of the Faculty Senate, and director of the McNair Scholars Program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.
A New Home for Yale University’s African Art Collection
The Laura and James J. Ross Gallery of African Art includes more than 250 items spanning more than 3,000 years of African history. Items include sculptures, ceramics, masks, ivory carvings, and metal works.
University of Oregon Plans for a New Black Cultural Center
In the fall of 2015, the Black Student Task Force at the University of Oregon issued 13 demands designed to make the campus more welcoming to African American students. One of these demands was to build a Black Cultural Center on campus. Efforts are underway to meet that demand.
A New Academic Program in Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University
The new Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies program at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth will explore issues of race and ethnicity as active social, political, historical, and cultural processes.
University of Southern California to Launch the Race and Equity Center
The university has hired Shaun R. Harper to lead the new initiative and to serve as the Clifford and Betty Allen Professor in Urban Leadership. Currently, Professor Harper is the director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity at the University of Pennsylvania.
Vast New Online Archive of African American History Materials
The University of Minnesota Libraries' Umbra Search African American History website offer users access to more than 400,000 digitized archival materials documenting African American history from more than 1,000 libraries and cultural organizations.
A New Online Archive of the First Blacks in the Americas
The online bilingual archive is called the First Blacks in the Americas/Los Primeros Negros en las Americas. It documents the earliest history of the African diaspora in what is now the Dominican Republic.
Wellesley College Offers a New Minor Degree Program in Comparative Race and Ethnicity
The new minor at the highly rated women's college, where Blacks make up 5 percent of the student body, will allow students to create a structured yet individualized plan of study from interdisciplinary courses that offer rigorous and complementary approaches to understanding race and ethnicity.
Black Studies Achieves Departmental Status at Washington University in St. Louis
As a full department, African and African American studies will be better positioned to set curriculum and drive hiring decisions. Gerald Early, the Merle King Professor of Modern Letters, will serve as the inaugural chair of the new department.
University of Alabama Debuts Online Archive of Documents Relating to the Scottsboro Boys
The archive, “To See Justice Done: Letters from the Scottsboro Trials,” includes thousands of letters, documents, petitions, and telegrams that were sent to Alabama governors during the legal proceedings.
New Minor Degree Program in Africana / Black Studies at Niagara University in New...
Courses in the new minor will be offered by several departments including history, sociology, literature, political science, law, communication and education. Students can choose from two tracks. One will focus on African American history and culture and the other will focus on the African diaspora.
Professor Seeks to Solve the Mystery of the Man Who Claimed to Be the...
Sylvester Magee died in Columbia, Mississippi, in 1971. He claimed he was born a slave in 1841 and after securing his freedom was a soldier in the Union Army during the Civil War. If true, the 130-year-old Sylvester Magee was not only the last surviving American slave, he was the last living Civil War veteran.
Temple University Scholar Leads Effort to Remember Pennsylvania’s Slaves
Charles L. Blockson, the curator emeritus of the Afro-American Collection at Temple University in Philadelphia, led an effort to commemorate the lives of enslaved Africans who labored in Pennsylvania or who were transported through Philadelphia on their way to southern plantations.
A New African American Center Planned at the University of California, Berkeley
The new center will be named after Fannie Lou Hamer, the voting and civil rights activist. The agreement to establish the center comes after a year of talks among the administration, the Black Student Union and other campus African American groups.
Emory University Opens Its Refurbished African Art Galleries
Only 5 percent of Emory's African art collection can be displaced at one time. The refurbished galleries allow museum officials to easily change exhibits, allowing for more of the university's vast collection of African art to be seen by museum visitors.
A New Database of Peer-Reviewed Articles on Black Males in Education
Louis Harrison and Anthony Brown of the University of Texas at Austin have created The Black Male Education Research Collection. The new website is a repository of research on issues relating to Black men in all levels of education, with a special emphasis on higher education.
Western Illinois University to Eliminate Degree Program in African American Studies
Western Illinois University in Macomb has announced that is eliminating several degree programs due to low number of students pursing bachelor’s degrees in these fields. One of the degree program being eliminated is African American studies. Blacks make up 19 percent of the undergraduate student body at the university.
New Website Explores the Origins of African American Music
Scholars at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, have debuted an interactive website that chronicles what is believed to be among the earliest examples of the music of the African diaspora.
Princeton University’s Toni Morrison Papers Archive Is Now Available to Researchers
Professor Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities Emerita and the 1993 Nobel Prize winner for literature. She joined the faculty at Princeton in 1989 and taught creative writing classes until 2006.
University of Oregon Establishes Living/Learning Community for Black Students
The residential community will be housed in the university's Living Learning Center. The space set aside for the Umoja Pan-African Scholars community can house up to 80 students.
The First Documented Black Student at Cambridge University
In 1848 Alexander Crummell, the son of a slave in the United States, enrolled at Cambridge University to study moral philosophy.
Harvard University Receives the Vast Archives of Televangelist Carlton Pearson
Carlton Pearson, a former Pentecostal televangelist, has donated his personnel archives to the Andover-Harvard Theological Library. The archives include thousands of hours of raw and produced footage from Pearson's days as a televangelist.
British University to Offer the First Black Studies Degree Program in Europe
Birmingham City University enrolls about 22,500 students and its student body is considered to be one of the more diverse in England. Beginning in the fall of 2017, the university will offer a bachelor's degree program on people of African descent, their culture, their history, and their contributions to British society.
A New Ph.D. Program in African American Preaching and Sacred Rhetoric
The new Ph.D. program at the Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis will focus on the special role that preaching has in the African American community, viewing it as an art form, a force for social change, and an area overdue for academic study.
New Center at Washington University to Study How Racism Impacts Social Mobility
The Collaboration on Race, Inequality, and Social Mobility in America (CRISMA) will study ways in which inequality and structural racism affect racial/ethnic disparities in achievement, life chances, social and economic mobility, and health in the United States.
