Melissa Harris-Perry (b. 1973)

(Source: Indiewire.com)

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I vigorously object to the oft-repeated sentiment that African-Americans should avoid public disagreements and settle matters internally to present a united front. It’s clear from the history of black organizing that this strategy is particularly disempowering for black women, black youth, black gay men and lesbians, and others who have fewer internal community resources to ensure that their concerns are represented in a broader racial agenda. Failing to air the dirty laundry has historically meant that these groups are left washing it with their own hands.

–Melissa Harris-Perry, in the essay “Breaking News: Not All Black Intellectuals Think Alike,” published in The Nation

Biographical Notes: Melissa Harris-Perry is a professor of political science at Tulane University, where she is founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South. Professor Harris-Perry earned her B.A. at Wake Forest University and a Ph.D. in political science at Duke University. A political commentator, she appears regularly on MSNBC and she has a regular opinion column that appears in The Nation.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Cathy Cohen (b. 1962)

(Source: The University of Chicago Chronicle)

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[W]hen we include black youth as full and equal members of our political community, it means that we acknowledge their worth and will debate and pursue politics that reflects their priorities and needs.

–Cathy Cohen, interviewed by Henry Jenkins for Confessions of an Aca Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins

Biographical Notes: Cathy J. Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science. She is the author of two books, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press 2010) and The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press 1999), and many articles. She earned her B.A. at Miami University and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Michigan.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Bell Hooks (b. 1952)

(Source: AscentMagazine.com)

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When we allow ourselves to experience the sensual pleasures of various black hair textures (especially in its natural state), we unlearn some of the negative socialization we are bombarded with about black hair.

–bell hooks in Sisters of the Yam

 

Biographical Notes: Activist and cultural critic bell hooks (born Gloria Watkins) has held positions at Yale University, Oberlin College, and the City University of New York. She is the author of 30 books. The Hopkinsville, Kentucky native earned a bachelor’s degree at Stanford University, an M.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

(Source: TheCotillionOnline.Com)

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

(Source: Boston.Com)

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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