President Barack Obama giving his inaugural address, January 20, 2009

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For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

— Inauguration address, as transcribed by Time Magazine

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Biographical Notes: Barack Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he became the first Black editor of the Law Review. From 1992 to 2004, he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. During his campaign for the presidency of the United States, a minor controversy was touched off when some of his opponents took issue with his claim that he had been a constitutional law professor at UC. Eventually, the University issued an official statement that put the debate to rest:

UC Law School statement: The Law School has received many media requests about Barack Obama, especially about his status as “Senior Lecturer.” From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School’s Senior Lecturers have high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined.

Reprinted from FactCheck.org

To read more on this controversy, click THIS LINK to FactCheck.org.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Brown University senior Rakim Brooks is a Black Scholar to Watch

(Source: Brown University)

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Rakim Brooks. When he graduates from Brown University this coming May, Rakim Brooks may have already begun packing his bags for England. Selected this past November as one of the nation’s 32 Rhodes Scholars, Brooks will be spend two post graduate pursuing an M.Phil in comparative social policy at Oxford University.

An Africana studies and philosophy major, Brooks is an academic standout and recipient of an undergraduate Mellon Fellowship. He is currently writing an honors thesis on African American leadership after the Civil Rights movement. His achievements are now, however, limited to the classroom. A Brown University press release describes his achievements outside of the classroom:

He has worked as a writing fellow, a research assistant, and a member of Brown’s Mock Trial Team. He has also chaired the Africana Studies Departmental Undergraduate Group as well as the Academics and Administrative Affairs Committee of the Undergraduate Council of Students (UCS). One of four students appointed by UCS to the Task Force on Undergraduate Education, Rakim served on that group’s General Education subcommittee. He has also completed internships at the Center for Law and Social Policy and the Brookings Institute. His community service includes tutoring juvenile inmates at the Rhode Island Training School.

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Enslaved Black men and women being marched past the Capitol, 1815.

(Source: Library of Congress/About.com)

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U.S. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle at the Commander-in-Chiefs Inaugural Ball in Washington, January 20, 2009.

(Source: Reuters)

Posted by Ajuan Mance

This was one of the highlights of the day for me. I love Rev. Lowery began his prayer with one of the verses from “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” by noted Black poet James Weldon Johnson. This beautiful gesture paid tribute to the struggles and triumphs of those generations of African Americans who did not live to see the the election of a Black president.

My favorite quote from Lowery’s prayer: “Let all who do justice and love mercy say amen.” And the crowd thundered back, “Amen!”

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(Source: Associated Press)

(Source: Associated Press)

(Source: Associated Press)

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First Lady Michelle Obama (left). Catherine Donnelly, her mother and her grandmother at Princeton’s commencement ceremonies (right).

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Have you heard of Catherine Donnelly? She and her story have attracted intermittent attention during the last 12 months (a recent video interview with Connelly was linked through Yahoo News), because of the light that it sheds on the short-sightedness of racism. You see, Donnelly is a white woman from Louisiana, and during her first semester at Princeton University, Donnelly was Michelle Obama’s roomate.

Both Donnelly and her mother, now 71 years old are surprisingly candid about the minor tempest that erupted when they arrived at the University and learned that young Catherine’s assigned roommate was African American. In a June article in The Boston Globe, both women describe the moment:

As Catherine Donnelly climbed the stairs to her dorm room at Princeton University over a quarter-century ago, the Louisiana freshman felt ready for whatever lay ahead. But then she met Michelle.

Her full name was Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. She was so tall that her head seemed to brush the sloping ceiling of the cramped fourth-floor room. She was Donnelly’s new roommate. And she was black.

Well, this was new.

Growing up in the South, Donnelly had gone to school with a handful of black classmates, but living together was quite another thing. Donnelly quickly warmed to Robinson, with her big sense of humor and riveting stories. But she was worried that her mother, who Donnelly said had grown up in a racist family, would not react well. She was right.

When Donnelly’s mother, now 71, learned the race of her daughter’s roommate , she was beside herself. She called alumni friends to object. And the next morning she marched into the student housing office.

“I said I need to get my daughter’s room changed right away,” recalled Alice Brown, a retired schoolteacher, who has since come to regret her reaction. “I called my own mother and she said, ‘Take Catherine out of school immediately. Bring her home.’ I was very upset about the whole thing.”

To read the rest of the Boston Globe article, click this LINK.

For a more detailed interview with both Connelly and her mother, check out THIS ARTICLE at ajc.com.

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Florida State football standout Myron Rolle is a Black Scholar to Watch.

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If their achievements are any indication, then the young scholars I am profiling this week are destined to make a big splash. Whether as activists or intellectuals, scholars, artists, writers, or entrepreneurs, the young men and women listed below will most certainly dazzle and inspire us with their outstanding contributions in their areas of interest and expertise. After all, if each of their pasts is any sort of prologue, excellence and hard work are in their nature.

Myron Rolle. This Florida State University varsity football player is one of 32 winners of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. An aspiring neurosurgeon, Rolle plants to study medical anthropology during his two years at Oxford. Rolle will certainly achieve that goal, and probably much more. You see, he managed to complete his bachelor’s degree at FSU in only 2.5 years (a B.S. in exercise science, plus all of his pre-med requirements), and he accomplished all of this while playing Division I football. FSU Coach Bobby Bowden admitted to ESPN that in his nearly 60 year career, he has never before coached a Rhodes Scholar. Equally talented in the classroom and on the playing, Myron Rolles is a true rarity. Coach Bobby Bowden will probably never coach another one like him.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates

Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are — and I say this with big pride — the progeny of slaves. If there’s any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we’ve traveled since.

–Ta-Nehisi Coates, in :”This is How We Lost to the White Man,” Atlantic Monthly (1993) 301 no4 52-4, 56-8, 60-2 My 2008

I’m thinking back to one evening in Pittsburgh. It’s easy for me to remember this evening because I’ve only ever spent two nights in Pittsburgh, back in 1991. It was spring, I was a first-year grad student at UM-Ann Arbor, and I was on a research trip to interview my great aunt (my grandfather’s older sister) about her experiences of Fisk University in the 1920s and Bethune-Cookman College in the ’30s.

I got great material from our interview. My great-aunt told stories of her first Christmas at Fisk, her father’s pride at her graduation, and her exciting years as a young staff member at Bethune-Cookman College, where Mary McLeod Bethune herself introduced her to the man she would eventually marry. One of my favorite stories was of a very eventful road trip that she made, from Florida to New York, with her new husband and writer Zora Neale Hurston.

My aunt’s stories were rich in history and humor; but the part of the visit that was truly transforming for me was the time she and I spent together on my first night in her home. Her husband, my great-uncle, went to bed early that night, but my aunt and I stayed up chatting and looking at photos.

At the time that I visited my great aunt was in her 80s, but she had the energy and comportment of a woman in her 50s or 60s; and on that night we stayed up until almost 2am. She opened drawers and cabinets and pulled out photos and albums, all of which served as visual aids to the story she shared me that night, the story of my people, who they were and where they came from. That night I learned the names of many of my slave ancestors. I even saw photos of a few of them, taken during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was old enough to have met a couple of these amazing men and women, most of whom were former slaves, and she told me anecdotes about their personalities, their lives, and their relationship with her.

I listened with rapt attention, and I handled the photos and programs and other family memorabilia like the sacred objects that they were. That night, as I lay down to sleep – in a strange house, in a strange bed, in a city I had never visited before – I felt a sense of place and belonging of home that was different from anything I’d ever experienced before. Learning about the enslaved men and women before me — the forebears who had struggled and survived and laid a foundation for their future generations — had transformed my sense of self, adding breadth, depth, and meaning to my experience of being the Black descendant of these esteemed forbears. It was one of those unique moments when I realized that I had just gained something that I hadn’t even realized I’d missing.

The ancestors my great aunt described to me were all enslaved Black folks; but it never occurred to me to feel ashamed of or diminished by their bondage. On the contrary, I feel a greater pride in their lives and their relentless insistence on surviving than I ever could feel in the vague possibility that some of those kings and queens of pre-colonial Africa might somehow have been related to me.

The fathers may soar / And the children may know their names.

–Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

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(Source: Digital Schomburg Images of 19th Century African American)

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S. Craig Watkins

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Hip hop’s mostly symbolic moves against establishment authority illustrated how politics can often reach beyond familiar methods and venues. Nevertheless, because hip hop’s grandest political moves have taken place on the stages of pop culture, they have not been able to directly engage or affect the institutions that impact young people’s lives. They movement’s political identity has played a subordinate role to the power and popularity of hip hop’s commercial identity.

–S. Craig Watkins in Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, And The Struggle For The Soul Of A Movement

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Biographical Notes: S. Craig Watkins is associate professor of radio-tv-film, sociology, and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1994. He earned his B.A. at the University of Texas at Austin in 1988. Hip Hop Matters is his second book. His first book, Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema, was the first scholarly book to examine the influence of hip hop on U.S. cinema.

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