A print illustrating the burning of New York City’s “Colored Orphan Asylum” in the riots of 1863. The orphanage would rebuild in a different site four years later prior. Eventually the orphanage would find a permanent home in Harlem.

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Intelligent and honest observation of our Afro-American friends cannot fail to convince not only that they are rising race, but that they are phenomenally so. The writer began to see this a quarter century ago, when present at the commencement exercises of the Colored Orphan Asylum at Cooper Union, New York City. He expected them to excel in music, and possibly in recitation, which they did; but was not prepared for the pleasant surprise of these sable little folk decidedly distancing any other schools of white children of his acquaintance, of the same age, in geography, grammar, arithmetic, physiology, &c. He also found, subsequently, in visiting and addressing these schools and those of white children, and then revisiting and reviewing them, that the dark-skinned children, for some reason, remembered the points in the previous addresses much the best.

— George May Powell, “A Rising Race,” The Christian Recorder, August 2, 1894

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UNC Chapel Hill students, photographed in 1876 with their Black servant (foreground, with his bucket and broom).

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UNC Chapel Hill students volunteering at a Habitat for Humanity worksite, photographed in 2003.

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Morehouse School of Medicine Professor Ketema Paul (center), with two research assistants.

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“HBCUs have survived worse things than this, like the Civil War.”

— Dr. Ketema Paul, in “Why Black Colleges Might Be the Best Bargains,” U.S. News and Worlds Report, February 9, 2009

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Biographical Notes: Dr. Ketema Paul is  Assistant Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the Morehouse School of Medicine. His research explores the biological factors that impact sleep and wakefulness. Dr. Paul holds a B.S. in Biology from  Howard University and a Ph.D. in Biology from Georgia State University.

Alpha Phi Alpha pledges at Lincoln University. Thurgood Marshall (middle row, second from the right) would go on to become the first Black justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

(Source: ThurgoodMarshallTribute.com)

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Melissa Harris-Lacewell

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Many are portraying [Henry Louis Gates, Jr.] as a radical who easily and inappropriately appeals to race as an excuse and explanation. This image of Gates is inaccurate. In fact, more than any other black intellectual in the country Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was an apolitical figure. This is neither a criticism nor an accolade, simply an observation.

Gates is the director of the nation’s preeminent institute for African American studies, but he is no race warrior seeking to right the racial injustices of the world. He is more a collector of black talent, intellect, art, and achievement. In this sense Gates embodies a kind of post-racialism: he celebrates and studies blackness, but does not attach a specific political agenda to race. For those who yearn for a post-racial America where all groups are equal recognized for their achievements, but where all people are free to be distinct individuals, there are few better models than Professor Gates.

— Melissa Harris-Lacewell, from “Skip Gates and the Post-Racial Project,” published on TheNation.com

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Biographical Notes: Melissa Harris-Lacewell is Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University and the author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. She is also the co-author of The Kitchen Table blog (with Dr. Yolanda Pierce, the Elmer G. Homrighausen Associate Professor of African American Religion and Literature at Princeton Theological Seminary). Alas, The Kitchen Table ceased operations on July 7, 2009. You can, however, read earlier posts from this outstanding blog at this link.

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Houston A. Baker, Jr. (b. 1943)

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Ironically, no black public intellectual in the US has been more complicit in publicizing the myth of “post racialism” as an American reality than Professor Gates. The police spokeswoman from Cambridge said something like: “It is our position that the incident had nothing to do with race.” All I could hear were whisper tones of QVC: “And when you all buy into the Gates/Cambridge ‘race had nothing to do with it,’ we have some fine swamp land in Florida at a great discount. Or, maybe you’d like a bridge?”

— Houston Baker, writing for cupblog.com, the official blog of Columbia University Press

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Biographical Notes: Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1943, Houston A. Baker, Jr. holds a B.A. from Howard University (English), where he was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. (also in English) from the University of California — Los Angeles (UCLA). Baker is a Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He has also taught at Yale, the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Duke University.

Baker is the author of several books, including: Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism, Re-Reading Booker T; I Don’t Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South; Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era;
Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic; Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy, Blues, Ideology, and African American Literature: A Vernacular Theory; Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and others. An accomplished poet, Baker’s most recent collection is titled Passing Over.

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Derrick Bell is a visiting professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law. He has held this position for more than a decade. For a more detailed biography of this pioneering scholar in the field of critical race theory, follow this link.

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Gospel, and particularly the gospel choir at its best, echoes the tempos of the soul searching for God’s peace in the midst of a hostile world…Who among us, of whatever race, class, or creed, can hear gospel music without surrendering to the felt need to tap a foot, sway just a bit, perhaps even join in when the handclapping really gets going? Truly this music speaks to the unavoidable fact that, at bottom, we are all in the same boat.

–Derrick Bell in his “Prologue” to Gospel Choirs: Psalms of Survival in an Alien Land Called Home

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In 1844, Vashon’s son, George Boyer Vashon (above), would become the first African American to graduate from Oberlin College, as well as the college’s first Black valedictorian.

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“I have just returned from that noble institution, in Lorain County, Ohio, Oberlin College, where I left my son. I have no doubt but that it is the purest Christian College on the Unites States. The number of students last year was 404: 12 young gentlemen and 3 young ladies of the number are colored, yet I saw none of that low, poor, mean, black prejudice there. The Faculty there judge men by their moral worth, not by their color. I take pleasure in sending you a catalogue of the college…”

— From The Colored American newspaper, April 4, 1840

John Baxter Taylor (far right), photographed with his University of Pennsylvania Track and Field teammates (1904 – 1905 team photograph)

(Source: University of Pennsylvania Archives Digital Image Collection)

John Baxter Taylor (1882 – 1908).

For a detailed biography, follow this link.

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Kwame Anthony Appiah is ranked #5 on the list of the most cited Black scholars in the humanities.

Kwame Anthony Appiah (b. 1954)

(Source: )

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A multicultural education should be one that leaves you not only knowing and loving what is good in the traditions of your own sub-culture but also understanding and appreciating the traditions of others (and also critically rejecting the worst of all traditions). The principle of selection is clear: we should try to teach about those traditions that have been important to American history. This means that we begin with Native American and Protestant Dutch and English and African and Iberian cultures, adding voices to the story as they were added to the nation.

— Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Beware of Race Pride,” The American Enterprise, September 1995.

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Biographical Notes: Kwame Anthony Appiah is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy & the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He has taught at Duke, Cornell, Harvard, and Yale. He holds a B.A. and a Ph.D. from  Cambridge University in England.  He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including: Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (with Amy Gutmann); The Dictionary of Global Culture (co‑edited with Henry Louis Gates Jr.);  Bu Me Bé: Proverbs of the Akan (with his mother, the writer Peggy Appiah); Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy; The Ethics of Identity; and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Dr. Appiah has also published three novels, including Avenging Angel, a murder set at Cambridge.

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