Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

(Source: Boston.Com)

***

It turns out that I’m descended on my mother’s side from a white woman who was impregnated by a black slave, and on my father’s side from an Irishman who conceived with a black woman named Jane Gates. I have an Irish haplotype called Ui Neill that goes back to some fifth century king. I was searching for African roots, and they led to an African kingdom called the United Kingdom.

–From an interview with John Lauerman, in Business Week, Feburary 17, 2012

 

Biographical Notes: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Octavia V. Albert (c. 1853- 1890)

Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert was born into slavery in Oglethorpe, Georgia around 1853.  In 1870, she enrolled at Atlanta University, and by 1873 she was working as a teacher in Montezuma, Georgia. There she was courted by fellow teacher A.E.P. Albert, and the two were married in 1874. In the 1880s her husband’s duties as an ordained minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church took the family to Houma, Louisiana where, drawing on her deep Christian faith as well as the model set forth by her childhood minister, the political activist and former Congressman Bishop Henry H. Turner, she devoted her life to serving the local popula. Mrs. Albert frequently opened her home to the members of the rural community of former slaves and their families, listening to and recording their recollections of antebellum life. Eventually these sketches and stories would become The House of Bondage, a collection stories representing the memories of Houma, Louisiana’s ex-slaves. The book was published in 1890, shortly after Albert’s death. Albert’s stated goal in creating this volume was to “correct and to create history”; and the harrowing stories of the more than one dozen former slaves portrayed in her book serve as a powerful challenge to the revisionist nostalgia of the period’s more dominant plantation tradition.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Alexander Crummell (1819-1898)

Alexander Crummell was born in New York City to parents Boston and Charity Hicks Crummell. His mother was freeborn, and his father, a prosperous oyster man, was a former slave who was brought from Africa to the United States at the age of 13. Crummell’s parents were well acquainted with many of New York’s most influential African American writers and activists. Crummell was exposed early on to the potential for Black men and women to use literature as a tool for social change. The newspaper Freedom’s Journal was founded in their home when young Alexander was just 8 years old. Crummell began his education at New York City’s African Free School. In 1836, he enrolled at the Oneida Institute where he was one of four Black entering students. In subsequent decades, he and his African American classmates, Amos Beman, Henry Highland Garnet, and Thomas Sidney would all go on to distinguish themselves in the burgeoning movement for Black civil rights. He left Oneida after two years, attending courses in theology at Yale University and receiving private tutoring from Episcopal clergymen. He was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1844. Crummell completed his baccalaureate studies at Queens College, Cambridge. In later life Crummell settled in Washington D.C. where he would eventually establish and lead St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. In 1897, he established the American Negro Academy in order to foster the development and productivity of African American writers and scholars, in deliberate opposition to Booker T. Washington and other Black leaders who advocated vocational education as the sole pathway to Negro improvement. As a writer, Crummell was best known for his sermons and political tracts. The following selection is an excerpt from Crummell’s “Thanksgiving Day Sermon: The Social Principle Among a People and Its Bearing on Their Progress and Development.” Delivered in 1875, the sermon was first published in 1882, in pamphlet form:

[I]f there has been anything for which the colored people of this country have been and now are noted, it is for disseverance, the segregation of their forces, the lack of the co-operative spirit. . . . The people, as a body, seem delivered over to the same humble, servile occupations of life in which their fathers trod, because, from a lack of co-operation they are unable to step into the higher callings of business; and hence penury, poverty, inferiority, dependence, and even servility is their one general characteristic throughout the country, along with a dreadful state of mortality.

And the cause of this inferiority of purpose and of action is two-fold, and both the fault, to some extent, of unwise and unphilosophic leaders. For, since, especially emancipation, special heresies have influenced and governed the minds of colored men in this nation: (1) The one is the dogma which I have heard frequently from the lips of leaders, personal and dear, but mistaken, friends, that the colored people of this country should forget, as soon as possible, that they are colored people: a fact, in the first place, which is an impossibility. Forget it, forsooth, when you enter a saloon and are repulsed on account of your color! Forget it when you enter a car, South or West, and are denied a decent seat! Forget it when you enter the Church of God, and are driven to a hole in the gallery! Forget it when every child of yours would be driven ignominiously from four-fifths of the common schools of the country! Forget it, when thousands of mechanics in the large cities would make a strike rather than work at the same bench, in the same yard, with a black carpenter or brick-maker! Forget it, when the boyhood of our race is almost universally deprived of the opportunity of learning trades, through prejudice! Forget it, when, in one single State, twenty thousand men dare not go to the polls on election-day, through the tyranny of caste! […] Forget that you are colored, in these United States! Turn madman, and go into a lunatic asylum, and then, perchance, you may forget it! But, if you have any sense or sensibility, how is it possible for you, or me, or any other colored man, to live oblivious of a fact of so much significance in a land like this! The only place I know of in this land where you can .forget you are colored. is the grave!…

Posted by Ajuan Mance

The photo depicts Otelia Cromwell (second from the left) and other members of the Smith College class of 1900. Upon graduating, Cromwell became the first African American woman to earn a bachelor’s degree from this institution. She would go on to earn a master’s degree from Columbia University (1910) and a Ph.D. in English from Yale (1926). Each fall Smith College holds it’s Otelia Cromwell celebration in honor of her pioneering role.

(Photo source: Nodame on Flickr)

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Richard Theodore Greener, Dean of the Howard University School of Law, and the first African American to graduate from Harvard College (Class of 1970).

(Source: The Latimer-Norman Family Collection at Rutgers University)

Dear Readers and Subscribers,

I am happy to say that, after a long hiatus, Black on Campus will once again be featuring regular posts.

I truly enjoy the exchange with my readers around issues related to the African American experience in higher education, and I have missed you all during this period.

I am pleased to say that Black on Campus will continue to address key issues, figures, moments, and events that have shaped and continue to shape the educational experiences of people of African descent in the U.S. and abroad.

In addition, the blog will also serve as a showcase for the more than 500 images, books and emphemera that document the diverse experiences of U.S. Black students, faculty, alumni, and staff. Your humble and faithful blogger has amassed this collection over the past 10 years, and I am very excited about this opportunity to share the documentary history of Black education in the United States.

Many thanks to all of you during my time away. I am happy to be back at my keyboard, and I hope you continue to enjoy the articles and images that appear on this site.

All the best,

Ajuan Mance

bell hooks (Source: RGB Street Scholars Think Tank)

***

I used a quote by Snoop Doggy Dog at the NYU conference on black cinema, that really meant a lot to me. He said, “I don’t rap. I just talk. I want to be able to relax and conversate with my people.” Are we, cultural workers situated in the academy, developing a jargon about cultural production that does not allow us to “conversate and cross” these very borders that we’re talking about how cool it would be to cross? If we don’t find a way to “conversate,” all we’re ever talking about is that those of us who have certain forms of class privilege can enter the low-down and dirty spaces and take what we want to get out of those spaces, and take our asses right back home.

–from “Bomb the Root: The bell hooks Interview,” Reposted on the Root.com

***

Biographical Notes: Gloria Watkins (known professionally by her pen name, “bell hooks”), holds a B.A. from Stanford University (1973), an M.A. form the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz. One of the most prolific and influential feminist scholars of the last 30 years, she has written and published more than 20 books and numerous articles related to Black feminism, cultural studies, and critical analysis.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

(Source: Smithsonian Institution Portraits of a City)

Kudos to TheRoot.com writer Latoya Peterson for an article that cuts through the much of the hype and spin around the “acting white” phenomenon that supposedly plagues America’s Black youth.

Peterson draws on important research and analysis by Roland J. Fryer to complicate and question the generalization that all Black and Latin American young people engage in the self-sabotaging behavior of labeling high academic achievers as traitors to their respective races.

Peterson argues that the emphasis on the myth that all Black and Latino/a youth believe that good grades and academic excellence constitute “acting white” has drawn valuable energy and resources away from addressing the issues that truly impact the achievement of marginalized youth.

You can find her article, “The Myth of ‘Acting White’ and the Achievement Gap,” at THIS LINK.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).

— from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

•Number of states in which 80 percent or more of all white students graduate from high school in the standard four-year period: 23
•Number of states in which 80 percent or more of all black students graduate from high school in the standard four-year period: 5 — Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, North Dakota, and Idaho
(U.S. Department of Education)

• Percentage of all black students enrolled in higher education in 1980 who were male: 43.8%
• Percentage of all black students enrolled in higher education in 2007 who were male: 35.2%
(U.S. Department of Education)

• Percentage of white Americans who believe that blacks have an equal chance with whites to secure a good education: 80%
• Percentage of black Americans who believe that blacks have an equal chance with whites to secure a good education: 49%
(Gallup/USA Today poll)

• Percentage of white parents of preschool children in 2007 who believe that it is important to teach their children the alphabet: 66%
• Percentage of black parents of preschool children in 2007 who believe that it is important to teach their children the alphabet: 43%
(U.S. Department of Education)

• Percentage of white parents of preschool children in 2007 who believe that it is important to teach their children about numbers: 62%
• Percentage of black parents of preschool children in 2007 who believe that it is important to teach their children about numbers: 43%
(U.S. Department of Education)

• Percentage of white parents of preschool children in 2007 who read to their children every day: 67%
• Percentage of black parents of preschool children in 2007 who read to their children every day: 35%
(U.S. Department of Education)

• Median earnings in 2006 of a white American aged 25 to 34 who held a master’s degree: $50,000
• Median earnings in 2006 of an African American aged 25 to 34 who held a master’s degree: $50,000
(U.S. Department of Education)

• Percentage of white parents whose children are enrolled in urban public schools who state that “race is not a factor in the success of children at my child’s school”: 71.8%
• Percentage of black parents whose children are enrolled in urban public schools who state that “race is not a factor in the success of children at my child’s school”: 72.8%
(National School Boards Association)

• Percentage of black public school students in the United States who attend school where 75 percent or more of all students are members of minority groups: 50.1%
• Percentage of white public school students in the United States who attend schools where 75 percent or more of all students are members of minority groups: 3.2%
(U.S. Department of Education)

• Number of African Americans nationwide in 2004 who earned bachelor’s degrees in biochemistry: 67
• Number of African Americans in 2004 who earned bachelor’s degrees in biochemistry at the University of Maryland Baltimore County: 22
(University of Maryland Baltimore County)

• Median income of college-educated white women who worked full-time in 2005: $43,110
• Median income of college-educated African-American women who worked full-time in 2005: $45,273
(U.S. Census Bureau)

Posted by Ajuan Mance

(Source: Stanford Magazine)

Ernest Houston Johnson (bottom left), Stanford University’s first African American graduate, photographed with other members of the senior class intercollege football team. Johnson was a graduating member of the class of 1895. When he died of tuberculosis in 1898, he was buried with his Stanford diploma.

To learn more about his life and his legacy, follow THIS LINK.

Posted by Ajuan Mance