Founded in 1970

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies is a national, nonprofit research and public policy institution. Founded in 1970 as the Joint Center for Political Studies by black intellectuals and professionals to provide training and technical assistance to newly elected black officials, the Joint Center is recognized today as one of the nation’s premier think tanks on a broad range of public policy issues of concern to African Americans and other communities of color.

The Black Scholars Index will highlight several founders in upcoming features! So, stay tuned!

The Joint Center’s research and policy priorities are guided largely by issues of current concern to the African American community and other communities of color. The work is carried out by a team of nationally recognized experts, including both resident staff and consultants. From the days when the Joint Center focused primarily on providing technical assistance and policy information to public officials and policy experts in the United States and abroad, we have evolved into a dynamic “think tank” that objectively and thoroughly examines the impact of a wide range of policies and programs on African Americans. Today, our principal areas of work fall into seven categories:

Military Affairs
For over 20 years, the Joint Center has hosted an Army officer through its participation in the Army’s Senior Service College Fellows Program. Fewer than 20 universities, government agencies, and think tanks around the country participate in the program. The senior officers selected must be among the top 25 percent of their peer group. During his or her year in residence at the Joint Center, each fellow conducts research that is viewed as potentially beneficial to both the Army and Joint Center. The daily presence of these military fellows at the Joint Center creates an opportunity for an exchange of ideas within the Joint Center and the Army’s officer corps.

Founder - Louis E. Martin Served from 1970 to 1997

International Affairs
Since 1980, the Joint Center has worked to increase the involvement of African Americans and other minorities in international affairs and to raise the visibility of Africa and policies affecting the continent and the African diaspora.

Economic Advancement
Economic advancement plays a crucial role in the ability of African Americans to achieve equality. The Joint Center’s three areas of economic study include: Income and Poverty, Employment and Training, and Minority Business Development.

Emerging Leadership
From the very beginning, the Joint Center has been committed to providing guidance and training to emerging leaders in the African American community, particularly those in the public sector. This work continues today as a new generation of leaders emerge.

Founder - Dr. Kenneth B. Clark Served from 1970 to 2005

Social Policy
The Joint Center engages in a number of social policies that impact the economic advancement and political participation of African Americans, especially arts engagement, juvenile justice, youth development, the state of young black males in Washington, D.C. and community-based racial reconciliation.

Political Participation
The Joint Center’s work on African American’s Political Participation is widely acknowledged as among the best in the field. Our work includes the roster of Black Elected Officials, national opinion polls of African Americans, as well as work on voting rights and Redistricting issues.

Health Policy Institute
The Joint Center Health Policy Institute (HPI) is a pioneering program of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. HPI’s research, publications, activities, and projects are designed to accelerate progress beyond listing and analyzing a litany of health disparities. Rather, they are directed toward collective strategies that will produce real change—and real opportunities for health.

The history of the Joint Center has not only reflected the progress African Americans have made since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but has also mirrored the nation’s political and socio-economic progress over the last three decades. When the Joint Center first opened its doors, there were 1,469 black elected officials (BEOs). There are now over 9,500 BEOs in the United States.

President & CEO - Ralph Everett

Increasing black political participation formed the foundation of much of the Joint Center’s work during the 70′s and the 80′s. However, as the civil rights era gave way to the era of “economic rights,” the Joint Center signaled its expanding focus on job creation and workforce development and changed its name to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. The principle areas of work now include political participation, economic advancement, and health policy. The Joint Center stands primed to continue to drive the nation’s public policy discussions with independent and reliable research, analysis, and assessment.

Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the Joint Center is governed by a board of governors.

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If you or someone you know should be featured on The Black Scholars Index, please let us know – featured@blackscholarsindex.com

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2. NYPL: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
3. The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research

Marian Wright Edelman

Marian Wright Edelman is the Founder and President of the Children’s Defense Fund and the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi State Bar.

Marian Wright Edelman, one of five children, was born in and grew up in Bennettsville, South Carolina. Her father, Arthur Wright, was a Baptist preacher who taught his children that Christianity required service in this world and who was influenced by A. Phillip Randolph. He died when Marian was only fourteen, urging in his last words to her, “Don’t let anything get in the way of your education.”

Marian Wright Edelman went on to study at Spelman College, abroad on a Merrill scholarship, and she traveled to the Soviet Union with a Lisle Fellowship (which is now named in her honor). When she returned to Spelman in 1959, she became involved in the civil rights movement, inspiring her to drop her plans to enter the foreign service, and instead to study law. She studied law at Yale and worked as a student on a project to register African American voters in Mississippi.

In 1963, after graduating from Yale Law School, Marian Wright Edelman worked first in New York for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and then in Mississippi for the same organization. There, she became the first African American woman to practice law. During her time in Mississippi, she worked on racial justice issues connected with the civil rights movement, and she also helped get a Head Start program established in her community.

During a tour by Robert Kennedy and Joseph Clark of Mississippi’s poverty-ridden Delta slums, Marian met Peter Edelman, an assistant to Kennedy, and the next year she moved to Washington, D.C., to marry him and to work for social justice in the center of America’s political scene. They had three sons.

In Washington, Marian Wright Edelman continued her work, helping to get the Poor People’s Campaign organized, a project Dr. Martin Luther King started just before he was assassinated. She also began to focus more on issues relating to child development and children in poverty. She founded the Washington Research Project, a public interest law firm and the parent body of the Children’s Defense Fund. For two years she served as the Director of the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University.

Marian Wright Edelman then established the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) in 1973 as a voice for poor, minority and handicapped children. She served as a public speaker on behalf of these children, and also as a lobbyist in Congress, as well as president and administrative head of the organization. The agency served not only as an advocacy organization, but as a research center, documenting the problems and possible solutions to children in need. To keep the agency independent, she saw that it was financed entirely with private funds. In 1992, Marian Wright Edelman and the Children’s Defense Fund formed the CDF Freedom Schools as an offshoot from the roots of the civil rights movement and the “Mississippi Freedom Summer Project” of 1964. CFR Freedom Schools Program provides summer and after-school enrichment that helps children fall in love with reading, increases their self-esteem, and generates more positive attitudes toward learning.

In the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was elected President, Hillary Clinton’s involvement with the Children’s Defense Fund meant that there was significantly more attention given to the organization. But Edelman did not pull her punches in criticizing the Clinton administration’s legislative agenda — such as its “welfare reform” initiatives — when she believed these would be disadvantageous to the nation’s neediest children.

As part of the efforts of Marian Wright Edelman and the Children’s Defense Fund on behalf of children, she has also advocated pregnancy prevention, child care funding, health care funding, prenatal care, parental responsibility for education in values, reducing the violent images presented to children, and selective gun control in the wake of school shootings.

Among the many awards to Marian Wright Edelman:

* 1991 – ABC’s Person of the Week – “The Children’s Champion”
* MacArthur “genius” award
* Only non-Mayor awarded the US Conference of Mayors Presidential Award for Outstanding Achievement
*More than 65 honorary degrees

Mrs. Edelman served on the Board of Trustees of Spelman College which she chaired from 1976 to 1987 and was the first woman elected by alumni as a member of the Yale University Corporation on which she served from 1971 to 1977. She has received many honorary degrees and awards including the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Prize, the Heinz Award, and a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship. In 2000, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for her writings.

Marian Wright Edelman is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. She is also a board member of the Robin Hood Foundation, the Association to Benefit Children, and City Lights School and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

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If you or someone you know would like to be featured on The Black Scholars Index, please let us – featured@blackscholarsindex.com.

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Dr. Frederick D. Patterson

Dr. Frederick Douglass Patterson (1901-1988) was the namesake of THE Frederick Douglass (c. 1818-1895) and lived in the same neighborhood, 3 blocks away, as a matter of fact. And like his namesake, he contributed a great deal to the course of education for African-Americans and other societal advancements in the United States.

At the age of 2, Frederick D. Patterson moved from DC to Austin Texas after both his parents died of tuberculosis. Distraught by the death of his parents and this transition, he faced many challenges and was voted least likely to succeed by his 8th grade classmates. Soon after, his sister took him under her wings, sacrificed, and made certain that he received a good education. She enrolled him in the elementary school of Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson College, an HBCU) in Austin, Texas – for which she paid $8 out of her $20 a month salary.

Her investment paid! The boy’s passions for education were sparked during his years at Prairie View Normal and Industrial Institute (now Prairie View A & M University, an HBCU) when he was assigned to the Agriculture Department and began interacting with a number of top veterinarians.

Frederick Douglass Patterson would receive a stunning three advanced degrees over the next nine years. By age 31, he had achieved the Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine and the Master of Science from Iowa State, and the Doctorate of Philosophy from Cornell University. He then returned to Tuskegee Institute (now University), where he had already spent a short time teaching, as head of the Department of Agriculture and the first person on the faculty to earn the doctorate. Under his tenure, the veterinary program reached such outstanding quality that the state of Alabama granted funds for white students to study veterinary science there, a unique occurrence in the segregated South.

Dr. Patterson’s rise to academic stardom was not without its challenges. His career was infused with the juxtaposition between eloquent academic lessons and stark racial ones. Although he was the only African American in Iowa State’s veterinary program, the integrated campus would provide him with a relatively unfettered experience. However, he had to endure a humiliating situation at a summer military camp. Because he and one other African American student ate at a separate table from the white students, he was treated as a “pariah,” he wrote in his autobiography:

“I learned a lesson with regard to race that I never forgot: how people feel about you reflects the way you permit yourself to be treated. If you permit yourself to be treated differently, you are condemned to an unequal relationship.”

His range of experiences endowed Dr. Patterson with the wisdom and vision that inspired a committee to select the young man as the third president of Tuskegee Institute in 1935. His Tuskegee presidency would last nearly a quarter of a century, until 1953.

During his tenure at Tuskegee, Dr. Patterson transformed the baccalaureate institution into a prestigious university with cutting edge graduate programs, all of which are flourishing today. He founded the Commercial Dietetics program, which infused professional cooking with business and service savvy and placed African American students in unprecedented high level internships across the country. The veterinarian understandably took personal interest in the school’s Veterinary Medicine program, which afforded southern African Americans the only opportunity to become veterinarians in that region of the country. Tuskegee has graduated 75% of the nation’s African American veterinarians. His foresight into emerging fields also prompted him to spearhead the Engineering program, which from its inception enabled African Americans to gain high level technical jobs across the country.

In the late 1930’s, Dr. Patterson defied all of the political, social, and financial odds against training African American youth to fly military airplanes. Not only did he win for Tuskegee a coveted federal contract to establish a training site, but he persuaded the government to establish a full air base at Tuskegee. That accomplishment gave birth to the now legendary Tuskegee Airmen of the World War II U.S Army Corps. Nearly 1,000 African Americans completed their first training at Tuskegee Army Air Field.

As a college president, his impacts on the community extended to those at all levels of the educational spectrum. As Dr. Patterson surveyed the town of Tuskegee, the vast numbers of residents whose wooden houses were inadequate and frequently destroyed by fire struck him. Realizing the capacity of his largely vocational college, he pooled available talent and resources and created an intricate program that trained and assisted the low-income citizens in building new, sound homes made of a unique concrete construction. Methods associated with the “Tuskegee concrete block” were recognized by the federal government as a pragmatic approach to low-income housing and were adapted as models for rural homes, both domestically and internationally.

As Dr. Patterson continued to reach out to more expansive constituencies, his most farreaching initiative took flight in 1944. While searching for new methods by which private black colleges could become more financially sound, he, in 1943, published an open letter to the presidents of private HBCUs urging them to band together, pooling their resources and fundraising abilities. The next year, the United Negro College Fund, the first cooperative fund raising venture in American higher education, began its activities soliciting donations to private HBCUs, with far greater efficacy than any one of its member colleges alone. In 1964, he was elected President and Chief Executive Officer and served in both capacities until 1966. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. took immediate interest and an active role in the burgeoning organization; extraordinary leadership has propelled the organization to record heights ever since. Nearly sixty-years after its inception, UNCF remains the most successful minority higher education assistance organization in America, having raised over $2 billion for its 39 member colleges and universities and providing educational access for the nation’s African American youth.

Dr. Patterson’s prominence in higher education won him an invitation to sit on President Harry S. Truman’s President Commission from 1946-1947. That group’s findings influenced every major piece of higher education legislation during the 1960’s. Among the historic developments that evolved from the Commission were the system of community colleges and the enactment of Title III of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which brought direct institutional support to America’s smaller colleges and universities.

Dr. Frederick D. Patterson

Of all his endeavors, Dr. Patterson’s starkest accomplishment remains the scope of the people he influenced. Over the course of his 87 years, he inspired Americans as well as African Americans. He influenced higher education policy and practice. He changed the way that philanthropy would be conducted. He generated a dynamic that pushed every organization he touched to its limit. Hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to feel the effects of Frederick D. Patterson’s work and dedication.

Less than one year before his death, he received his highest honor. On June 23, 1987, President Ronald Reagan awarded Dr. Patterson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Its inscription reads,

“By his inspiring example of personal excellence and unselfish dedication, he has taught the nation that, in this land of freedom, no mind should go to waste…”

His autobiography, Chronicles of Faith, was published in 1991.

The alumni of the member institutions now totals more than 300,000 individuals. In 1996, UNCF honored its founder through the creation of the Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute, the first African American led research institute in the country to focus solely on education.

He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., the first African-American male fraternity. Additionally, 19 colleges and universities awarded Dr. Patterson 20 honorary degrees.

UNCF HISTORY:

Do you remember their PSAs?

Related posts:

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Henry Lewis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he is Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Recently, he became the Editor-In-Chief of The Root, a daily online magazine that provides thought-provoking commentary on today’s news from a variety of black perspectives. The site also hosts an interactive genealogical section to trace one’s ancestry through AfricanDNA.com, a DNA testing site co-founded by him.

He went to Yale and gained his B.A. summa cum laude in History. The first African-American to be awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the day after his undergraduate commencement, Gates set sail on the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 for the University of Cambridge, where he studied English literature at Clare College. With the assistance of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, he worked toward his Ph.D. in English. While his work in history at Yale had trained him in archival work, Gates’ studies at Clare introduced him to English literature and literary theory.

At Clare College, Gates was also able to work with Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian writer denied an appointment in the department because, as Gates later recalled, African literature was at the time deemed “at best, sociology or socio-anthropology, but it was not real literature.” Soyinka would later become the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize; he remained an influential mentor for Gates and became the subject of numerous works by Gates.

In October 1975, he was hired as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. In July 1976, Gates was promoted to the post of Lecturer in Afro-American Studies with the understanding that he would be promoted to Assistant Professor upon completion of his dissertation. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to Associate Professor in 1984. After being denied tenure, he left for Cornell in 1985, and stayed until 1989. After a two-year stay at Duke University, he moved to his current position at Harvard University in 1991. See Gates’ recent blog entry on The Root about the incident that occurred a few days ago in the news.

As a literary theorist and critic, meanwhile, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions; he draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to textual analysis and matters of identity politics.

As a black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon and has instead insisted that black literature must be evaluated by the aesthetic criteria of its culture of origin, not criteria imported from Western or European cultural traditions that express a “tone deafness to the black cultural voice” and result in “intellectual racism.” Gates tried to articulate what might constitute a black cultural aesthetic in his major scholarly work The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, a 1989 American Book Award winner; the work extended the application of the concept of “signifyin(g)” to analysis of African-American works and thus rooted African-American literary criticism in the African-American vernacular tradition.

While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of black literature and black culture, Gates does not advocate a “separatist” black canon but, rather, a greater recognition of black works that would be integrated into a larger, pluralistic canon. He has affirmed the value of the Western tradition but envisions a loose canon of diverse works integrated by common cultural connections:

“Every black American text must confess to a complex ancestry, one high and low (that is, literary and vernacular) but also one white and black…there can be no doubt that white texts inform and influence black texts (and vice versa), so that a thoroughly integrated canon of American literature is not only politically sound, it is intellectually sound as well.“

Moreover, Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes and maintains that it is “ridiculous” to think that only blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. He argues, “It can’t be real as a subject if you have to look like the subject to be an expert in the subject,” adding, “It’s as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn’t appreciate Shakespeare because I’m not Anglo-Saxon. I think it’s vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a black mouth or a white mouth.”

Mediating a position between radicals advocating separatism and traditionalists guarding a fixed, highly homogeneous Western canon, Gates has faced criticisms from both sides; some criticize that the additional black literature will diminish the value of the Western canon, while separatists feel that Gates is too accommodating to the dominant white culture in advocating integration.

As a literary historian committed to the preservation and study of historical texts, Gates has been integral to the Black Periodical Literature Project, an archive of black newspapers and magazines created with financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities. To build Harvard’s visual, documentary, and literary archives of African-American texts, Gates arranged for the purchase of “The Image of the Black in Western Art,” a collection assembled by Dominique de Ménil in Houston, Texas. Earlier, as a result of his research as a MacArthur Fellow, Gates had discovered Our Nig, the first novel in the United States written by a black person, Harriet E. Wilson, in 1859; he followed this discovery with the acquisition of the manuscript of The Bondswoman’s Narrative, another narrative from the same period.

As a prominent black intellectual, Gates has focused throughout his career not only on his research and teaching but on building academic institutions to study black culture. Additionally, he has worked to bring about social, educational, and intellectual equality for black Americans and has written pieces in The New York Times that defend rap music and an article in Sports Illustrated that criticizes black youth culture for glorifying basketball over education. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. Gates’ prominence in this field led to him being tapped as a witness on behalf of the controversial Florida rap group 2 Live Crew in their obscenity case. He argued the material the government alleged was profane, actually had important roots in African-American vernacular, games, and literary traditions and should be protected.

Asked by NEH Chairman Bruce Cole about how Gates would describe what he does, Gates responded, “I would say I’m a literary critic. That’s the first descriptor that comes to mind. After that I would say I was a teacher. Both would be just as important.

In 1999, Gates consulted with Anthony Appiah in the creation of Microsoft Encarta Africana Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Black History and Culture (First edition ed.). Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corp. ISBN 0735600570.

Check out additional work by Dr. Gates.

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If you have suggestions for features on The Black Scholars Index, please contact us immediately – featured@blackscholarsindex.com.

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The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (part of NY Public Libraries)

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a national research library devoted to collecting, preserving and providing access to resources documenting the experiences of peoples of African descent throughout the world. The Center’s collections first won international acclaim in 1926 when the personal collection of the distinguished Puerto Rican-born Black scholar and bibliophile, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, was added to the Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints of the 135th Street Branch of The New York Public Library. In the 1930s and 1040s, renowned librarian Augusta Baker pioneered the efforts in what was then the 135th Street Branch of the New York Library to provide access to more African-American children’s books. At the time, there were only 27 books about ‘the American Negro’ suggested for inclusion in all school libraries and only four (4) of them were written for children:

Augusta Baker, Renowned Librarian

1. For Freedom by Arthur Fauset
2. Popo and Fifina by Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes
3. Upward Path by M. T. Pritchards
4. African Myths by Carter G. Woodson

However, Arturo Schomburg and James Weldon Johnson were instrumental in helping Augusta Baker purchase 40 books for the 135th Street Branch library in Harlem, NY. The 3 criteria for evaluation of purchased books were:

1. Language – could not be dialect-laden or include derogatory terms such as darkie
2. Theme – characters could not be presented as “a clown or a buffoon whose only object in life [was] to serve his master faithfully and without question”
3. Illustration [most important] – could not offer insulting caricatures of African-Americans.

These books along with the ultimate donation of Arthur Schomburg’s private collection of literature and artifacts ultimately became the Schomburg Center.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

Schomburg served as curator from 1932 until his death in 1938. Renamed in his honor in 1940, the collection grew steadily through the years. In 1972 it was designated as one of The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library and became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Today, the Schomburg Center contains over 10,000,000 items and provides services and programs for constituents from the United States and abroad.

The Center provides access to and professional reference assistance in the use of its collections to the scholarly community and the general public through five research divisions, each managing materials in specific formats but with broad subject focus. The Center’s collections include art objects, audio and video tapes, books, manuscripts, motion picture films, newspapers, periodicals, photographs, prints, recorded music discs and sheet music.

The Schomburg Center facilitates access to these holdings through mail and telephone reference services, participation in national computerized databases and publication of bibliographies and other finding aids.

Library materials at the Schomburg Center are housed in five collection divisions, according to format:

• Art and Artifacts Division
• General Research and Reference Division
• Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division
• Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division
• Photographs and Prints Division

The Schomburg Center promotes the study of the histories and cultures of peoples of African descent and interprets its collections through exhibitions, publications and educational, scholarly and cultural programs.

For more information, visit: http://www.nypl.org/research/sc/sc.html

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If you or someone you know would like to featured on The Black Scholars Index, please let us know – featured@blackscholarsindex.com.

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Today, we elected to showcase a different type of feature. This one highlights an incredible feet from a young Lady who has made history!

A 15-year-old Los Angeles girl has become the youngest African-American female pilot to fly solo cross country.

Kimberly Anyadike landed a single-engine Cessna to cheering crowds at Compton Woodley Airport this past Saturday. She took off from Compton 13 days before with an adult safety pilot and Levi Thornhill, an 87-year-old who served with the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. They flew to Newport News, Va., making about a dozen stops along the way.

Anyadike learned to fly when she was 12 at Tomorrow’s Aeronautical Museum, an after-school program that offers aviation lessons to at-risk youth [BSI doesn't agree with that descriptive phrase at all].

[From NBCLosAngeles.com]

An interview before take-off…

And we are happy that she talks about high cognitive abilities in African-American and the assumptions against them in the video above.

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If you or someone you know should be featured on The Black Scholars Index, please let use know be emailing featured@blackscholarsindex.com.

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Albert Edward Manley was the first African-American Male President of Spelman (1953-76), Johnnetta Betsch Cole became the first African-American female President (1987-97), and Beverly Daniel Tatum is the current African-American female President (2002-present).

Spelman College started in 1881 in a church basement by two missionaries, Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles, providing quality education to black women and girls. It was first named Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary and its first study body consisted of approximately 10 female students – most former slaves and 1 young girl. But soon, the basement became overcrowded with students and with the help of John D. Rockefeller, the school moved to a nine-acre site once used as army barracks by Union troops during the Civil War. In 1884, the school became Spelman Seminary after John D. Rockefeller’s wife, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, in gratitude John D. Rockefeller and his donation. Spelman Seminary became Spelman College in 1924 after considerable expansions in curriculum and organization.

Manley, Cole, Stewart

Albert Edward Manley, one of Spelman’s only two male presidents, became the first African-American male President in 1953. Under his administration, Spelman’s enrolled and physical footprint grew considerable. Dr. Manley graduated from Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, N.C., in 1930. He earned a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1938 and a doctorate from Stanford University in 1946. Donald Mitchell Stewart, the second of the two male presidents, served as president after Manley from 1976-86.

Johnnetta Betsch Cole

In 1987, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., became the first African-American female President of Spelman College. She spearheaded the most successful capital campaign in the history of the college by raising $113.8 million, which included a gift of $20 million from comedian Bill Cosby and his wife, Camille Hanks Cosby. Dr. Cole is a descendent of Florida’s first black millionaire Abraham Lincoln Lewis. She enrolled in Fisk University at age 15, but transferred to Oberlin College, where she completed a B.A. in sociology in 1957. She attended graduate school at Northwestern University, earning her masters (1959) and Ph.D. (1967) in anthropology. Dr. Cole received honorary degrees from Bates College in 1989, Mount Holyoke College in 1998, Mills College in 1999, Howard University in 2009.

Beverly Daniel Tatum

Beverly Daniel Tatum, Spelman’s current African-American Female President, began her tenure in 2002.S She is Spelman’s 9th president. Born four months after the 1954 ruling, Beverly Daniel Tatum calls herself an “integration baby. She is the author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations about Race and Can We Talk about Race? and Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation, her latest book. Dr. Tatum was raised in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. She earned a B.A. in psychology from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut and a M.A. and Ph.D in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan. She also holds a M.A. degree in Religious Studies from Hartford Seminary.

When asked “Why, 50 years after Brown, is a place like Spelman still relevant?”, Dr. Tatum responded, “When young black women come to Spelman, they see a lot of energetic women who look like them. That’s a powerful magnet, to say, ‘This place was built for me!’ That’s not to say a black student can’t get a good education at a majority white institution. [But] it can be very powerful to be in a place where the focus – if there is a focus on your gender or race – it seen as a positive and not a disadvantage.”

Spelman is part of the largest consortium of historically Black institutions of higher learning in the world. Its four partner institutions include Clark Atlanta University, the Interdenominational Theological Center, Morehouse College and Morehouse School of Medicine. Spelman shares cross-registration with its undergraduate partners. They also share the Robert W. Woodruff Library.

Today, Spelman has more than 2,100 students from 41 states and 15 foreign countries. It employes more than 84% full-time faculty with PhDs or other terminal degrees. Student-faculty ratio is 11:1.

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If you know someone who should be featured on BSI, please let us know immediately, featured@blackscholarsindex.com

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Today, BSI highlights the Damon J. Keith Law Collection of Africa-American Legal History at Wayne State Law School. Here’s a bit of information from its website.

The collection, initiated by Professor Emeritus Edward J. Littlejohn, is dedicated to recording the history of African American lawyers and judges. It was created to meet the need for a central repository for the nation’s African-American legal history.

The collection intends to use its endowment, now exceeding $2.1 million dollars to gather oral histories, support lectures and research, provide educational teaching materials and traveling exhibits, and generally assist in the preservation and popularization of the lessons learned during the course of the historic struggle of the African American people for democracy in the United States.

Since September 5 2004, the site has had a little under 10,000 visits (9,700). Let’s see if we can increase this number a bit!

Visit today! http://keithcollection.wayne.edu/

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