Education defined my father. It was who he was.

— Merrill Jones

Jerome B. Jones (1937 – 2008)

Pioneering educator Jerome B. Jones died on July 4, 2008. His death was the result of injuries sustained after being struck by an automobile on June 26.

Jerome B. Jones was the first African American to become the superintendent of the St. Louis Public Schools. He accepted this post in 1983 and served 7 years before retiring in 1990. In 1995 he came out of retirement to join the faculty of Howard University, where he founded and directed the the Department of Educational and Administrative Policy.

Prior to his untimely death, Jones had accepted a new position as dean of academic affairs at the University of the Virgin Islands in St. Croix. His first day at the University would have been Monday, July 7.

He is survived by two daughters, Merrill Jones of Washington, D.C., and Allison Jones of Atlanta.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Presidential hopeful John McCain may have trouble distinguishing between Pittsburgh and Green Bay, but Black on Campus does not. Take a break from the political gaffes of the current campaign season and enjoy this brief account of the Black history of Pittsburgh’s largest academic institution.

History and Overview: The University of Pittsburgh was founded in 1787, as a private academy. The first African American students entered Pitt during the late 1800s, and the University produced its first Black graduate in 1893.

Today Pitt enrolls nearly 17,000 students on its main campus. Roughly 1400 of those students are Black. Pitt also enrolls a significant number of international students, among whom several African nations are represented. They are: Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Libya, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe.

Black Milestones at the University of Pittsburgh:

• 1893 — William Hunter Dammond becomes the first African American to graduate from the University of Pittsburgh (civil engineering with honors).
• 1910 — Jean Hamilton Walls becomes the first African American woman to earn a bachelor’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh (mathematics and physics)
• 1922 — Council of Negro College Women is founded to foster intellectual growth and camaraderie, and to build a support and friendship network among Black women at Pitt.
• 1930 — Jean Hamilton Walls becomes the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation is titled, A Study of Seventy-Eight Negro Graduates of the University of Pittsburgh from 1920-1936).
• 1934 — Walter R. Talbot completes his doctorate and, thus, becomes the 4th Black person in the U.S. to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics.
• 1936 — John Woodruff, an African American runner on the Pitt rack tream, wins a gold medal in the 800-meter run at the Berlin Olympic Games.
• 1956 — Bobby Grier, Pitt Panthers football standout, becomes the first African American to play in the Sugar Bowl.
• 1964 — Dr. Frederick S. Humphries becomes the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh.
• 1967 — The Black Action Society is founded at Pitt.
• 1968 — Welsh S. White joins the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh Law School. White would go on to become the first African American to become a tenured professor of law at Pitt.
• 2008 — The University of Pittsburgh annual Black History month is officially named the “University of Pittsburgh K. Leroy Irvis Black History Month Program,” in honor of the history-making Pitt alum and trustee emeritus. Irvis was the first Black speaker of the Pennsylvania state legislature, and the first Black speaker of any state legislature since Reconstruction.

Jean Hamilton Walls (seated, left) and her women classmates, photographed in 1911.

(Source: Black Women at Pitt)

Posted by Ajuan Mance

The Geography of Freedom in 1820

Tricia Rose (Source: Metroactive.com)

Al Sharpton is incredibly articulate…But because he speaks with a cadence and style that is firmly rooted in black rhetorical tradition you will rarely hear white people refer to him as articulate. –Professor Tricia Rose in “Definitions – The Racial Politics of Speaking Well”

Do you remember when Senator Joe Biden referred to Senator Barack Obama as “articulate” and “clean”? Biden’s comments underscored the inflammatory nature of the politics of Black speech. Tricia Rose sheds a clarifying light on the important role of accent and rhythm in white evaluations of Black eloquence.

Biographical Notes: Tricia Rose was born in New York City and raised in Harlem and the Bronx. She completed her undergraduate studies at Yale University and earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Brown University. She has taught at NYU and University of California – Santa Cruz. She is currently a professor in the Africana studies department at Brown. Rose is the author of two books, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994) and Longing To Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy (2003).

For a detailed biography of Tricia Rose, click HERE.

To watch a video of Tricia Rose discussing misogyny in hip hope, click HERE.

A big thanks to ExpatJane at “Where the Hell Am I” for bringing to my attention the article “Definitions – The Racial Politics of Speaking Well,” written by Lynette Clemetson and published in the New York Times.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Many thanks to SjP at Sojourner’s Place for creating the Helping Hand emblem and for sharing tit with me by “paying it forward.” In turn, I would like to recognize the following blogs, both established and new.

If you are interested in participating by passing the helping hand to bloggers who have made a difference to you, then check out the guidelines (rules) at the end of this post.

First, I would like to offer the Helping Hand emblem to my blogging mentors (tip of the keyboard to SjP). These blogs and bloggers have inspired, encouraged, and supported me directly and indirectly. I have learned and gained much from their work and their words, and I am honored to be the beneficiary of their collective wisdom and experience.

They are:

Sojourner’s Place: your active support and regular visits have helped make the blogging community feel like home.

Electronic Village: your work in the Black bloggers’ community has increased our visibility and facilitated our growth in more ways than I can name.

The P. Cash Perspective: I have learned so much from your site. Thank you for everything.

Black Tennis Pro’s: this is such a unique blog. I learn something every time I visit. So glad to share the ‘sphere with you.

Hagar’s Daughter’s: an incredible blog with a wonderful name. Your encouragement has been inspiring and humbling. Your site is challenging and affirming, all at once.

Second, I am “Paying it forward” to the following blogs. Each of these blogs is outstanding in its own right. I encourage you to take check them out and leave a comment. Subscribe to your faves, and look for these blogs and bloggers on your favorite social networking and bookmarking sites. Every blogger can use a little love and attention, and the more you support us, the more we will thrive.

So here’s my list. I’m paying it forward to:

Morphological Confetti: this blog is lots of fun, and it’s informative and provocative too. After the most recent post on the history of watermelon and black folks, I think I’m in love!

Turista Africana: Turista writes about Africa from the unique perspective of an emigre who has returned (from the West). This blog presents Africa from the perspective of an insider who can (also (and sometimes has no choice but to) inhabit the outsider’s perspective.

Black Looks: Feminist perspectives from an African and Afro-Diasporic perspective. To borrow a phrase from SjP at Sojourner’s Place, this blog is “doing it and doing it well.”

Where the Hell Am I?: i have a soft spot for blogs by African American expats. Expat Jane’s Where the Hell Am I? is one of the best. Currently living in Seoul, South Korea, her perspectives on race, politics, and the challenges and joys that life offers up makes hers a blog worth returning to again and again.

Clement Nyirenda’s Blog: informative and thought-provoking commentary by a unique mind whose ideas remind us that blogging, the internet, and other technological developents each have an important role as tools for social change.

If you want to participate in spreading the Helping Hand, here are the rules:
The Rules:

1. Select 10 bloggers: 5 you consider your blogging Helping Hand then “Pay it Forward” by extending your “Helping Hand” to 5 additional bloggers in support and encouragement for their efforts.
2. In passing on the Emblem, each recipient must provide the name of blog or blog author with a link for others to visit.
3. Each recipient must show the Emblem and put the name and link to the blog that has given it to her or him.
4. Link the Emblem to this post: Helping Hand: Much Obliged and Paying it Forward so that others will know it origin and impetus.
5. If you have not already done so, show your recipients some love by adding them to your blog roll, Technorati Favorite list, or in any other way to further let them know that their blog voice is important to you and being heard.
6. Add your name to The Helping Hand meme at my new blog entitled The Emblem of the Helping Hand and don’t forget to leave a comment as a permanent record of all Helping Hand recipients.
7. Display the rules

Posted by Ajuan Mance

February 2, 1960: North Carolina A&T students stage a sit-down strike at the F.W. Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, NC. Pictured are Ronald Martin, Robert Patterson, and Mark Martin. The young men, who remained seated throughout the day, were refused service at this lunch counter, which served only white patrons. The next morning they returned with 25 more students. A fourth student is pictured at the far left. (Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Adrian Piper

Dear Friend,

I am black.

I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past, I have attempted to alert white people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative, or socially inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe there are no black people present, and to distribute this card when they do.

— The text of Dr. Piper’s “My Calling Card #1,” a conceptual piece that she performed intermittently, between 1986 and 1990. She would hand out cards to individuals who made a derogatory comment about Black people (see bottom of this page).

***

When I first read about Dr. Adrian Piper’s calling cards, I was thrilled by the wonderful audacity of the piece, both as textual artifact and as performance. It was around this same time (the mid-1990s) that I first encountered the drawings of her “Vanilla Nightmares” series (see below). Once again, the audacity of her work was exhilarating. So too was its incisive critique of so many of the racialized dynamics of the fashion industry, of miscegenation fears, and the literal fear of being consumed by the dark (Black) other.

Piper’s work in more traditional media (paint, collage, pencil, charcoal) is challenging and transgressive, drawing attention to the politics of race in an art world in which women artists of all ethnicities and Black artists of all genders are dramatically underrepresented. If those avenues for exhibiting traditional media tend to marginalize Black art and artists, then one could say that within the world of conceptual art Black artists are virtually non-existent; and the issues that such artists tend to take up in their work go largely unaddressed.

The Adrian Piper Research Archive sums up her role as a racial pioneer in the visual arts with this simple statement: “Adrian introduced issues of race and gender into the vocabulary of Conceptual art and explicit political content into Minimalism.”

Adrian Piper’s role as a pioneer is not limited to the visual arts. In 1987, while teaching at Georgetown University, she became the first African American woman in U.S. history to be tenured in the field of philosophy. During her years at Wellesley College, she would become the first African American woman in the U.S. to ever to be come a tenured full professor of philosophy.

Piper began her academic career by earning an associate’s degree in fine art from New York’s School of Visual Arts. She went on to earn a B.A. in philosophy from City College of New York, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University. Her interest in German philosophy also took her to the University of Heidelberg in West Germany, where she spent a year studying and translating some of the work of Emmanuel Kant.

Dr. Piper has taught philosophy at a number colleges and universities, including the University of Michigan, Stanford University, Georgetown University, University of California – San Diego, Wellesley College, the Royal Danish Academy of Art, and Ruhr Universität Bochum.

Piper describes the relationship between her two passions in the following passage from “On Becoming a Warrior,” her 2001 essay on the difficulty of managing dual careers in a academic establishment that is structured to accomodate only one area of specialization per faculty member:

For most of my adult life I have worked two full-time jobs, because
choosing between them is not an option for me. In my day job I am a philosophy
professor, and I moonlight as an artist. The two fields are very different.
Academic philosophers teach, do research, serve on committees, and give talks.
Artists who teach do all this, and also produce, document, market, exhibit, and
sell their work. But the two jobs are alike in that the more success you have in
either, the harder it becomes to manage the workload without assistance.

Piper’s teaching and scholarship in philosophy and her production and exhibition in the visual arts coexist alongside her third field of study and practice, hatha yoga. She began studying yoga in 1965, and began studying with Swami Satchidananda in 1966. In 1971 she became a svanistha. In 1985 she became a brahmacharin, a devoted student of yoga whose practice is focused on relinquishing an attachment to external factors and relationships as a source of contentment, and which includes the adoption of a celibate lifestyle. Dr. Piper has published several pieces on the yoga and its relationship to western philosophy. For links to and citations for these publications, click THIS LINK.

For a great online resource on Adrian Piper’s life and work, visit the Adrian Piper Research Archives website.

Adrian Piper. Vanilla Nightmares #8. 1986.

Adrian Piper. My Calling Card #1.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

From the Schomburg Center online exhibition, Harlem 1900-1940: An African American Community. This photo depicts young Black writers and intellectuals gathered at the Harlem Home of Regina Andrews and Ethel Ray Nance. The group, photographed at a party held for Langston Hughes, includes (from left to right): Poet Langston Hughes, sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson, historian E. Franklin Frazier, doctor and author Rudolph Fisher, and legislator Hubert Delaney. This photo is from the collection of Regina Andrews.

Posted by Ajuan Mance
 

Anna Julia Haywood Cooper

***

Do you hold a U.S. passport? Was you passport recently issued? If your answer is “yes” to both of these questions, the open up your passport to the next-to-last page. There you will find an engraving of the Statue of Liberty and the following quote from Anna Julia Cooper, a Black pioneer in higher education, the only female member of the American Negro Academy, and one of the first African American women to earn a Ph.D.:

The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class – it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.

— Anna Julia Cooper, from “Woman Versus the Indian”

***

Biographical Notes: Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was born on August 10, 1858, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her parents were was Hannah Stanley, an enslaved Black woman, and George Washington Haywood, her master. Cooper’s extraordinary intellectual talents were evident at an early age, and by the age of 8 she was made a “pupil teacher” at St. Augustine’s Normal and Collegiate Institution, a school for free Blacks. In 1881 Cooper, who already knew Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, was admitted to Oberlin College. She earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees at Oberlin. In 1925, at the age of 67, she earned her Ph.D. from The Sorbonne in Paris, France. Anna Julia Cooper spent much of her life as an educator, a feminist spokesperson, an anti-racist activist, and an advocate for pan-Africanism. She died in 1964, at the age of 105.

For a detailed biography of Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, click on THIS LINK to her profile on the Voices from the Gaps website.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

It is in the irresistible course of events that all men who have been deprived of their liberty shall recover this precious portion of their indefeasible inheritance. It is in vain to stem the current; degraded man will rise in his native majesty and claim his rights. They may be withheld from him now, but the day will arrive when they must be surrendered.

–John Brown Russwurm, the first African American graduate of Bowdoin College, in his commencement speech, given September 6, 1826.

***

Biographical Notes: Named after his father, John Brown Russwurm was the son of a white merchant from a wealthy Virginia family and an enslaved Black woman living in Jamaica, where the young Russwurm was born. John was sent by his father to pursue primary and secondary education in Quebec. Eventually he joined his father and stepmother in Maine, where they helped him enroll in Bowdoin college. John Brown Russwurm graduated from Bowdoin in 1826, the first African American to earn a degree from that institution, and the second African American known to have received a bachelor’s degree from a U.S. college or university.*

He would go on to work as a teacher at Primus Hall, a school for free Black children located in Boston, and as a junior editor for Freedom’s Journal, the first paper in the nation to be owned, published, and edited by African Americans, before migrating to Liberia, where he edited The Liberia Journal, became superintendent of schools, and eventually served as the governor of the Maryland Settlement in that country.

*It is possible and even likely that other African Americans graduated from U.S. colleges and universities before Russwurm and his predecess Alexander Twilight. Such records may have been destroyed or not yet discovered; and it is unclear how many people of African descent may have attended and/or graduated from U.S. colleges and universities, but were passing for white.

Posted by Ajuan Mance