• Percentage of U.S. public school students who are Black males: 8% (Journal of Blacks in Higher Education)

• Percentage of U.S. public school teachers who are Black males: 2% (Journal of Blacks in Higher Education)

• Percentage of 18- to 24-year-old African Americans enrolled in college in 1996: 27% (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

• Percentage of 18- to 24-year-old African Americans enrolled in college in 2006: 32.3% (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

• Obama administration stimulus funds allotted to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) for the preservation of historic buildings: $14.25 million (Journal of Blacks in Higher Education)

• Number of bachelor’s degrees awarded to Black women during the 2005-2006 school year: 94,341 (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

• Numer of bachelor’s degrees awarded to Black men during the 2005-2006 school year: 48, 079 (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

• Mean score on the reading and mathematics section of the SAT for white students from households earning less than $20,000: 972 (Journal of Blacks in Higher Education)

• Mean score on the reading and mathematics sections of the SAT for Black students from households earning between $160,000 and $200,000: 960 (Journal of Blacks in Higher Education)

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Andre Narcisse (1990 - 2009)

(Source: Yale Alumni Magazine)

***

You could never stop learning when you were around him. He was in love with every moment he experienced.

– Jonah Quinn, on classmate and friend, Andre Narcisse

***

From the age of three until the end of my 8th grade year, I lived in the village of Freeport, a suburb of New York city, located on the south shore of Long Island. Freeport is one of a handful of small, ethnically diverse, middle-class communities clustered together on the side of the island that was not immortalized in The Great Gatsby.

Freeport, Roosevelt, Hempstead, Uniondale, Baldwin. When I think about my childhood, these are the places that come to mind.

Thus is was with particular shock and sadness that I read of the recent death of a Andre Narcisse, Roosevelt native, in his dorm room at Yale University. A former teacher at Uniondale High School remembers Narcisse as, “probably one of the most brilliant students to come into the science program, if not the school,” and young Andre was greatly missed by both teachers and classmates when he left for Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, at the beginning of his junior year.

The recipient of a National Achievement Scholarship, awarded to Black students who earn high scores on the PSAT, Narcisse was an academic standout at Exeter, where his commitment to academic excellence earned him a spot in Yale University’s class of 2012.

Sadly and ironically, it was at Yale, a place that should have marked the beginning of his young life, that Andre Narcisse passed away. Roommates discovered the 19 year-old in his dormitory room, around 11am on Sunday. He did not respond to attempts to resuscitate. His cause of death is unknown, though police have found no signs of foul play.

On Sunday night, a large group of Narcisse’s friends gathered in a campus chapel to share stories about his life.

On Monday night, more that 300 Yale student gather in the courtyard of Branford College residence for a candlelight vigil in memory of this beloved student.

My sincerest condolences to his family and friends.

***

Yale students gathered at a Monday night vigil in Andre Narcisse’s memory.

(Source: Yale Daily News)

Sources:

Newsday

Yale Daily News

NBC Connecticut

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Princeton University Professor Cornell West

(Source: nj.com)

***

Just like the musicians, I’ve got a unique voice. I’m constantly searching for truth. I don’t restrict myself to traditional boundaries. There’s a difference between a vocation and a profession. One’s a calling, the other’s a career. I have a calling. When you have your calling you have to be true to yourself and true to the God that called you. My calling is to try and tell the truth.

– Dr. Cornel West, in an interview in publish in Inside Jersery

***

Biographical Notes: Cornel West is the Class of 1943 University Professor of African American Studies and Religion, at Princeton University. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University (he completed his degree in only three years), West went on to complete his Ph.D. at Princeton.

West is the author of a number of books and articles, including the following:

• Black Theology and Marxist Thought (1979)
• Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (1982)
• Prophetic Fragments (1988)
• The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (1989)
• Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (with bell hooks, 1991)
• The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (1991)
• Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism (1993)
• Race Matters (1993)
• Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (1994)
• Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America (with rabbi Michael Lerner, 1995)
• The Future of the Race (with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 1996)
• Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America (Edited by Kelvin Shawn Sealey, 1997)
• The Future of American Progressivism (with Roberto Unger, 1998)
• Cornel West: A Critical Reader (George Yancy, editor) (2001)
• Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (2004)
• Post-Analytic Philosophy, edited with John Rajchman.
• Hope On a Tightrope: Words & Wisdom (2008).
• Brother West: Living & Loving Out Loud (2009).

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Profilic writer-scholar bell hooks (nee Gloria Watkins)

(Source: Rhetericia on PhotoBucket)

***

For many years, and even now, generations of black folks who migrated north to escape life in the south, returned down home in search of a spiritual nourishment, a healing, that was fundamentally connected to reaffirming one’s connection to nature, to a contemplative life where one could take time, sit on the porch, walk, fish, and catch lightning bugs. If we think of urban life as a location where black folks learned to accepts a mind/body split that made it possible to abuse the body, we can better understand the growth of nihilism and despair in the black psyche. And we can know that when we talk about healing that psyche we must also speak about restoring our connection to the natural world.

– bell hooks in Sisters of the Yam (180)

***

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.

From Jet Magazine, 1952

***

Biographical Notes: A graduate of New York’s Fieldston School, Clifford Alexander, Jr. completed his B.A. at Harvard in 1955. He went on to earn a law degree from Yale (1958). He served as an attorney and advisor on the White House staff from 1964 - 1967, before becoming the director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commision (until 1969). He served as the Secretary of the Army under the Carter Administration.

Today Alexander serves on the Board of Governor’s of the U.S. Stock exchange and sits on the boards of a number of U.S. corporations. He is the father of Elizabeth Alexander, the Yale University English professor chosen to compose and read the inaugural poem for the swearing in of Pres. Barack Obama, on January 20, 2009.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Dr. Melissa Harris-Lacewell

***

Typically advocates of marriage equality try to reassure the voting public the same-sex marriage will not change the institution itself. “Don’t worry,” we say, “allowing gay men and lesbians to marry will not threaten the established norms; it will simply assimilate new groups into old practices.”

This is a pragmatic, political strategy, but I hope it is not true. I hope same-sex marriage changes marriage itself. I hope it changes marriage the way that no-fault divorce changed it. I hope it changes marriage the way that allowing women to own their own property and seek their own credit changed marriage. I hope it changes marriage the way laws against spousal abuse and child neglect changed marriage. I hope marriage equality results more equal marriages. I also hope it offers more opportunities for building meaningful adult lives outside of marriage.

– Melissa Harris-Lacewell in “Rethinking Marriage. The World Has Changed. It’s Time!,” from The Nation, posted on AlterNet.com

***

Biographical Notes: Melissa Harris-Lacewell is Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Brown University President Ruth Simmons

***

Brown University president Ruth Simmons has opted to take a voluntary salary cut as part of continued cost-cutting measures. This will be the third consecutive year that her salary has been lowered, although her overall compensation (which includes benefits and deferred compensation) will likely hold steady or even increase.

Apparently Simmons requested her first salary decrease in 2007. Her total salary for this year (minus benefits and other compensation) will likely come in at a sum of $536,000, down from $600,000 in the previous fiscal year. Not too bad for a reduced salary; but I absolutely appreciate the willingness of the institution and its administrators to lead by example during these challenging economic times.

Read more on salary cuts and administrator compensation at this link: The Brown Daily Herald

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Northern Universities and Southern Education

The program organized by Yale, Harvard and Columbia for 120 Negro students this summer is an encouraging first step in using northern universities to upgrade southern education. Officials at the three schools hope to increase the number of Negro students going on to graduate school by supplementing the preparation they receive at southern colleges. Stressing humanities and social sciences, the program will enrich summer school courses with special tutorials; it will expose the Negro students to the complicated process of admission at northern graduate schools, and return them to colleges in the south with more ambitious ideas about undergraduate education.

Dean Ford has very rightly warned, however, that the benefits of the program should not be judged by the “statistical jump” in the number of Negroes going on to graduate school this year, or in the immediate future. The current program will only involve only a handful of students, for barely more than eight weeks. Although the southern Negroes will live with students from many other parts of the country, and meet regularly with men who are going through the academic mill, concrete results will not be visible for some time.

In fact, the most important contribution of the present program may be the example it sets for further action by northern universities, rather than its immediate benefits for southern Negroes. The principle of joint action exemplified by this experiment provides in many cases the most effective means for upgrading southern Negro education. By combining resources northern institutions will broaden the impact of their projects.

This program should encourage further joint efforts by northern schools to improve the quality of undergraduate education available to Negroes, and open the doors of graduate schools. Joel Fleishman, the moving force behind this summer’s program, has suggested that Ivy League schools form a “consortium” with other universities, and work through established white institutions in the South to extend more staff fund to Negro colleges. He hopes that the energy and innovation may “rub off” or “ricochet” from North to South in a “cooperative educational exchange.”

This kind of consortium may eventually prove impracticable as a result of opposition from southern universities. But the principle of collective action is a good one, and this summer’s program should inspire more ambitious projects in the future.

–The Harvard Crimson, Monday, March 23, 1966

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Edward Orval Gourdin (1897 - 1966). A graduate of the Harvard class of  1921 (LL.B., 1924), Gourdin was a senior and a star on the University track team when he set the world record in the broad jump. He went on to compete in the 1924 Paris Olympics, where he would win a silver in this, his signature event. Eventually he would be appointed a U.S. Attorney (under FDR), and later a judge.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Chirlane McCary today (far left) with husband Bill de Blasio and children Dante and Chiara.

(Source: Bill de Blasio for Public Advocate)

If you took a women’s studies course during the late 1980s, then you may already be familiar with Chirlane McCray.  Her poem, “I Used to Think,” was included in Homegirls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), a staple in both feminist studies and Black studies courses of the late 20th century. Here’s a brief excerpt from McCray’s poem:

[...]

I’ve spent my life as a Black girl

a nappy-headed, no-haired,

fat-lipped,

big-bottomed Black girl

and the poem will surely come out wrong

like me.

And, I don’t want everyone looking at me.

If I could be a cream-colored lovely

with gypsy curls,

someone’s pecan dream and sweet sensation,

I’d be poetry in motion

without saying a word

and wouldn’t have to make sense if I did.

If I were beautiful, I could be angry and cute

instead of an evil, pouting mammy bitch

[...]

–from “I Used to Think,” by Chirlane McCray

Her participation in the Homegirls anthology was not Chirlane McCray’s first or most courageous effort on the part of advancing Black women’s interests and issues. A member of the groundbreaking Combahee River Collective, she was also one of the first (if not the first) African American woman to write openly about lesbianism in a mainstream periodical. Her highly controversial article, “I Am a Lesbian,” appeared in Essence Magazine in 1979, where it sparked an intergroup dialogue around gender and sexuality in Black communities.

Today Chirlane McCray is a marketing executive for Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center, but she is still challenging mainstream values and sensibilities, in even broader and more visible arenas. She features prominently in a recent series of campaign ads created in support of her husband, New York City political candidate Bill de Blasio. De Blasio is running for New York City Public Advocate, and the recent advertisements featuring the candidate with his wife and children are the first political ads in anyone’s memory to openly feature and Black-white mixed race couple.

In liberal New York these ads may well have been more of a boon than a distraction, but an article on Ben Smith’s Politico blog notes that even as recently as 2007, only 77% of Americans “approved” of interracial relationships. In 1994, that number was less than 50%. While de Blasio won the Democratic primary (via runoff) in New York, there is a significant likelihood that his campaign strategy (featuring his wife and children freely throughout his campaign) would have dissuaded more candidates that it attracted, had he run in a more conservative region of the country.

But dDe Blasio isn’t running in a more conservative region. He is running in New York; and he has a strong chance of getting elected to this post, which is only a couple of political steps away from becoming the mayor. I say, “Run Bill, Run.” And let this office be only the first step in a career that will take you all the way to Gracie mansion. How thrilling it would be for the greatest city in the world to have the first radical Black feminist as its first lady woman.

Posted by Ajuan Mance