Gloria Chuku, chair and professor of Africana studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, received the 2017 Ali Mazrui Award for Scholarship and Research Excellence from the Toyin Falola Annual Conference on African Diaspora. She is the first woman to receive the award.
Ophelia Weeks, who served for more than 30 years on the faculty at Florida International University in Miami, stepped down from her post earlier this year. Now, she has been granted the title of professor emerita. She has not retired. In April she was named president of the University of Liberia in Africa.
Linda Royster Beito, associate dean of arts and sciences at Stillman College in Alabama, will share first prize in the Alabama Writers’ Conclave 2017 Screenwriting Competition. The screenplay deals with civil rights leader T.R.M. Howard’s involvement with the Emmett Till murder case.
Alvia Wardlaw is a professor of art history and director and curator of the University Museum at Texas Southern University in Houston. In 1996, she became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in history at the University of Texas at Austin.
The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis has announced that Russell J. Rickford is the winner of the 2016 Hooks National Book Award. The award is given to an author of a book that “best advances an understanding of the American civil rights movement and its legacy.”
The award honors Dr. Marshall Shepherd’s work in rainfall climatology and its effects on urban areas. He will receive the honor at the society’s annual awards banquet on January 10.
Three finalists have been named for the 19th annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize that recognizes the best book on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition published in the preceding year. Only one of the three finalists is African American.
The prize honors an individual who has made lasting scholarly contributions to racial, ethnic and/or religious relations. Dr. Tatum, president emerita of Spelman College in Atlanta, will receive a medal and a $25,000 prize at a ceremony in October 2018.
Elizabeth Catlett is one of the most celebrated sculptors of the twentieth century. The granddaughter of slaves, she was the first African American woman to earn a master of fine arts degree at the University of Iowa.
In 1967 Dorothy J. Phillips became the first African American women to earn an undergraduate degree at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. The university has established a fellowship program and an endowed chair in her honor.
The honorees are Em Claire Knowles of Simmons College in Boston, Tressie McMillan Cottom of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and Robert A. Winn of the University of illinois at Chicago.
This past Sunday, Tuskegee University held a chapel service to honor John W. Whittaker, the educational institution’s first chaplain. The service was part of the Whittaker family reunion that took place on campus.
Jacqueline Allen Trimble, chair of the department of languages and literatures at Alabama State University in Montgomery, was named as the recipient of the 2017 Balcones Poetry Prize from the Balcones Center for Creative Writing at Austin Community College.
Ibrahim I. Cissé, the Class of 1922 Career Development Assistant Professor in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will receive $240,000 over the next four years from the Pew Charitable Trusts to support his research.
LaShawn Harris, an associate professor of history at Michigan State University in East Lansing, received the 2017 Philip Taft Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
A native of Chillicothe, Ohio, and a two-time graduate of Ohio University, Joseph Carter Corbin moved to Arkansas in 1872. Three years later he founded the Branch Normal College, which today is the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.
Sabrina Strings is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She will use the fellowship to complete work on her book, Thin, White & Saved: Fat Stigma and the Fear of the Big Black Body.
Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, was honored by the U.S. Presidential Scholars Foundation and DiOnetta Jones Crayton, associate dean for undergraduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received an award from the Women in Engineering Pro-Active Network.
Christopher Brown II, the new president of historically Black Kentucky State University in Frankfort, has announced a series of new executive appointments for his leadership team.
The honorees are William Darity Jr., the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies and Economics at Duke University, and Kenon Brown, an assistant professor of advertising and public relations at the University of Alabama.
Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, recently unveiled a bust of Edward McKnight Brawley, who in 1875 became the first African American to graduate from the university. He went on to serve as president of what is now Selma University in Alabama. Brawley also was president of Morris College in Alabama.
Davene M. White of Howard University received the inaugural Director’s Award from the Office of Research on Women’s Health of the National Institutes of Health. Lester Spence, an associate professor of political science, received the Provost’s Prize for Faculty Excellence in Diversity from Johns Hopkins University.
Johnnetta B. Cole, the former president of Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, was recognized by having a dormitory named in her honor on the college’s campus. The Johnnetta Betch Cole Honors Hall will be reserved for students with at least a 3.0 grade point average.
Pellom McDaniels III, curator of African American collections at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University in Atlanta, received the 2017 Primary Source Award for Research from the Center for Research Libraries.
In 2002, Harvard University allocated money to the Portraiture Project after it was revealed that of the hundreds of official portraits hanging on the walls of campus buildings, almost none were women or members of minority groups. A new portrait of Orlando Patterson is the 17th commissioned in the series.
Dr. Moore has been selected to receive the Scholars of Color Mid-Career Contribution Award and the Dr. Carlos J. Vallejo Memorial Award for Lifetime Scholarship from AERA’s Multicultural/Multiethnic Education Special Interest Group.
Princeton University in New Jersey has announced that West College, one of the oldest buildings on campus, will be renamed to honor professor emerita Toni Morrison. And an auditorium will be renamed to honor professor emeritus Sir Arthur Lewis. Both scholars are Nobel Prize winners.
LaShawn D. Harris, an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University, has been chosen to receive the 2017 Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians. The award is given annually to the author of the best book of the year on African American women’s and gender history.
Emmanuel Katongole, an associate professor of theology and peace studies at Notre Dame, will spend a year in sub-Saharan African conducting research on ethnic, religious, and ecological violence. The fellows program is administered by the Association of Theological Schools and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.
James M. Rosser, former president of California State University, Los Angeles had a building named in his honor. Arletha McSwain of Bethune Cookman-University won an award for her efforts in distance learning and a portrait of Carrie Parker Taylor, the first Black woman to enroll at Indiana University, was unveiled.
Rion Scott, who teaches English at Bowie State University in Maryland, received the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for Debut Fiction at the 2017 PEN Literary Award Ceremony. The award came with a $25,000 prize.
On April 18, several descendants of the slaves that were sold by the university in 1838 will come to Washington, D.C., for the ceremony to rename buildings that have honored university officials who participated in the slave trade.
The search committee is looking for a scholar “with an established academic profile of distinction and a demonstrated desire to promote the rule of law through the study of civil rights.”
Gregory H. Robinson is the University of Georgia Foundation Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Georgia. Founded more than 175 years ago, the Royal Society of Chemistry is the largest organization in Europe for advancing the chemical sciences.
The award is the highest honor conferred by the American Choral Directors Association. It is given out every two years to a choral leader who has made unusual contributions to the art of choral music.
Roger Wilkins, the civil rights legend, author, government official, journalist, and educator, joined the faculty at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, in 1988 as the Clarence J. Robinson Professor in History and American Culture. He remained on the faculty for nearly 20 years.
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