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.
Poynter Institute to Launch the Leadership Academy for Diversity in Digital Journalism
The tuition-free program for minority journalists will include instruction on navigating newsroom culture, leadership, networking, mentoring, and the business of digital journalism. The National Association of Black Journalists will work with the institute to develop the curriculum.
Emory Acquires Rare First Edition of David Walker’s 1829 Book Appeal
The book was written and published in 1829 by Walker, a self-educated African American merchant. It is one of the earliest known written indictments of the institution of slavery. The first-edition acquired by Emory, one of only six known to exist, was owned and signed by W.E.B. Du Bois.
Toni Morisson Delivering the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University
The lecture series was endowed in 1925 with the honoree designated as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry for the duration of the six-lecture series. Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate and professor emerita at Princeton University, is this year's honoree.
Georgetown University to Offer African American Studies Major
The new African American Studies major includes 10 courses and offers concentrations in language, literature, arts, and culture or in history, behavioral science, and social inquiry.
University of North Florida Launches New Institute of Race and Ethnic Relations
The new institute is one of only two centers focusing on issues of race in the Florida state university system and the only one that focuses on research. The institute will sponsor six research symposiums this year.
New Academic Consortium Will Oversee the Publication of the Journal African Arts
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Florida, and Rhodes University of South Africa each will be responsible for one issue of the quarterly journal each year.
University of Connecticut to Establish a Living / Learning Community for Black Men
The Scholastic House Of Leaders who are African American Researchers and Scholars will be located in a 200,000-square-foot dorm set to open in 2016. About 40 Black men will be able to participate in the living/learning community.
Ethnic Studies Courses in High School Can Lead to Academic Success for Minority Students
A new study by researchers at Stanford University found that minority students who took an ethnic studies course in high school had higher attendance rates and greater academic success than minority students who did not take such classes.
Bucknell University Debuts Africana Studies Major
The new major has nine requirements including core courses in Africana studies and classes in history, social sciences, humanities, and the arts. Seniors will be required to write a thesis under the mentorship of a faculty member.
New Multicultural Center Planned on the Campus of the University of Michigan
The University of Michigan has announced that it will build a new multicultural center in the heart of its campus. The new $10 million center will replace the William Monroe Trotter Multicultural Center, which was located off campus in a former fraternity house.
University of California Sell Stocks of Three Prison Companies
The Afrikan Black Coalition, a student group representing Black students at all 10 University of California campuses, had demanded that the university divest itself of prison-related stocks.
Steven Nelson to Lead the African Studies Center at UCLA
Dr. Nelson is a professor of African and African American art and architectural history at the university. Professor Nelson is currently working on books about the Underground Railroad and the history of the city of Dakar.
New Director Seeks to Expand the Focus of Emory’s James Weldon Johnson Institute
Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University, is seeking to expand the scope of the institute from one dealing mostly with the humanities to a large number of academic disciplines.
