The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education back issues from April 2004:
Dorothy Burnett Porter Wesley 1905-1995
Apr 01, 2004 ... Dorothy Porter Wesley was known as a human encyclopedia and keeper of the keys to the archives of African-American history. As curator of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, she received a collection of 3,000 donated items in 1930. By the time of her retirement in 1973 ...
News and Views; Harvard's New Financial Aid Plan Highlights the Disappointing Record of America's Leading Universities in Enrolling Low-Income Students
Apr 01, 2004 ... In the 1950s Harvard University president James B. Conant launched what some commentators called the greatest experiment in educational meritocracy the nation had ever seen. He established a new set of university scholarships and other measures to replace Harvard's WASP elite with a student body ...
News and Views; The Singular Attraction of Professor Cornel West
Apr 01, 2004 ... Probably no academic star in the United States divides the opinions of his peers so fiercely as Cornel West. Professor Henry L. Gates, chair of the African and Afro-American studies department at Harvard and an academic figure of great distinction, calls Cornel West "the preeminent ...
News and Views; An African-American Law School Professor Aims to Become the Fifth Black U.S. Senator
Apr 01, 2004 ... The political world was stunned this past March when Barack Obama (pronounced (bah-ROCK oh-BAHma), a 43-year-old African-American state senator and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago School of Law, crashed six opponents in the Democratic primary to select a candidate to run for the ...
News and Views; Brown University to Consider Reparations on Account of the Institution's Past Ties to Slavery
Apr 01, 2004 ... Others before us have said that it would be a good thing if all presidents and trustees of American institutions of higher education were required to pass a course in moral philosophy. They would then learn about the concept of virtue, principles of justice, and conflicts between moral ...
News and Views; Black Enrollments at the Nation's Christian Colleges Are on the Rise
Apr 01, 2004 ... The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities is a group of 105 institutions of higher learning that call themselves "intentionally Christ-centered colleges." These evangelical colleges are invariably conservative both morally and politically. Their students for the most part are ...
News and Views; The Ku Klux Klan on the Campus of the University of Louisville
Apr 01, 2004 ... Last October, rap artist Sister Souljah was invited to speak at the University of Louisville as part of a lecture series on diversity. Readers will recall that during the 1992 presidential election Bill Clinton scored major points with white voters in the political center as a result of his ...
News and Views; Faculty Ranks at Many Black Colleges Remain Last Bastions of Male Supremacy in African-American Higher Education
Apr 01, 2004 ... Black women now hold a large lead over black men in enrollments, degree attainments, graduation rates, honor roll status, and in almost every area of higher education. But there is one important area in which black women continue to lag the performance of black men. Black males still hold a ...
News and Views; How the Marriage Penalty Disproportionately Hurts Working-Class Black Families in Their Ability to Pay for College
Apr 01, 2004 ... As this journal has consistently shown, a majority of black families face tremendous obstacles in paying for their children's higher education. The first point is that the median income of black families in the United States is only 63 percent of the median income of white families. Even more ...
News and Views; Reed College's Commitment to Racial Diversity: Affirmative Action "Lite"
Apr 01, 2004 ... For the past 60 years every first-year student at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, has been required to take Humanities 110, a course designed to give students a well-balanced look at the cultural foundations of Western civilization. The course is taught by a team of 24 professors coming from a ...
News and Views; Calculating the African-American Graduation Rate at the Nation's Highest-Ranked Law Schools: The Dropout Rate Is Close to Zero
Apr 01, 2004 ... One of the arguments used by opponents of affirmative action in college and graduate school admissions is that institutions of higher education are doing black students a big disfavor by admitting them to colleges and graduate schools where it is assumed they cannot compete. This contention goes ...
Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address March 4, 1865
Apr 01, 2004 ... Fellow countrymen: At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, ...
News and Views; In a Rising Stock Market, Black College Endowments Underperform Those of Their White Peer Institutions
Apr 01, 2004 ... In 2003 the upturn in U.S. stock markets enabled college endowment funds to reverse a two-year decline in average values. For the entire calendar year of 2003, the Dow Jones Industrial Average posted a gain of 25.3 percent. The Nasdaq composite index, made up mainly of high-technology stocks, ...
News and Views; A Thesis on How Suppressing Racism May Tax White Brainpower
Apr 01, 2004 ... New research suggests that racially biased people expend valuable brain power when they suppress racist thoughts in order to avoid making a racial gaffe when dealing with black people. A study produced by a scientist at Dartmouth College finds that the diversion of brain power to suppress racism ...
News and Views; Leaving Half a Generation Behind: Only a Slim Majority of Young Blacks Ever Finish High School
Apr 01, 2004 ... A new report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University shows that half of the nation's black youth never even earn the basic key to enter college -- a high school diploma. The National Center for Education Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau both produce periodic reports on ...
Jasper, Texas: Six Years After the Nation's Most Hideous Hate Crime
Apr 01, 2004 ... Six years ago, James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old black man from Jasper, Texas, accepted a ride home from a bar from three white men in a pickup truck. They drove the black man outside of town to a remote wooded area. There they beat him until he was unconscious. Byrd was then bound around the ankles ...
News and Views; Recruitment Programs That Work: Increasing Black Student Enrollments in the Natural Sciences
Apr 01, 2004 ... Less than one percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded to African Americans are in the field of mathematics. Only 1.1 percent of all black bachelor's degrees are in the physical sciences. At the doctorate level, 5.7 percent of all Ph.D.s earned by blacks are in the physical sciences. This is ...
News and Views; Scholar Stuart Hall Named Among the Most Important Black Britons of All Time
Apr 01, 2004 ... Two years ago a poll conducted by the British Broadcasting Company produced a list of the 100 most important Britons of all time. Not one of the individuals selected was black. Now a new survey conducted over the Internet by the popular English Web portal EveryGeneration.com has produced a list ...
News and Views; Wall Street's Highest-Paid CEO Is a Black Man
Apr 01, 2004 ... People have been trading securities on Wall Street in lower Manhattan for centuries. And for nearly 300 years Wall Street was a white man's game. The only blacks you would find on the Street were shoe-shine boys and floor polishers. Slowly roles began to change. Yet even today few blacks show up ...
The Declining Enrollment of Black Students and Faculty at the University of Virginia
Apr 01, 2004 ... When JBHE began its survey of incoming black freshmen at the nation's highest-ranked universities more than a decade ago, the University of Virginia showed the highest percentage of blacks among its peer institutions. It ranked in first place in each of the first five years of our survey. But ...
Groundbreaking Research by a University of Virginia Chemist
Apr 01, 2004 ... In 2002, 44 African Americans earned Ph.D.s in the field of chemistry. But almost all blacks earning Ph.D.s in chemistry today are either taking positions in corporate America or teaching at historically black colleges and universities. Almost never do they make their way onto the faculties of ...
News and Views; The ETS Thesis on Why Blacks Tend to Have Low Scores on the SAT
Apr 01, 2004 ... It is well known that the average college-bound black student scores over 200 points, or 15 percent, lower than the average white student on the Scholastic Assessment Test. In most cases, this result is preceded also by blacks' poor performance in elementary and secondary school. In their latest ...
News and Views; The Citadel Comes Full Circle
Apr 01, 2004 ... The Citadel Military College of South Carolina in Charleston recently announced that this coming fall it would launch a minor degree program in African-American studies. A major degree program in black studies may follow in the years ahead. The Citadel says that the new program is designed to ...
News and Views; The Black Students Who Overturned the Whites-Only Clause in the Charter of Rice University
Apr 01, 2004 ... In the late nineteenth century, William Marsh Rice, an oil, cotton, and real estate tycoon, was said to be the wealthiest man in Texas. He left the bulk of his estate to a trust that was to establish the Rice Institute for Literature, Science, and the Arts. Rice's will specified that the ...
There Was a Time When the GOP Could Play the Race Card to the Detriment of Democrats
Apr 01, 2004 ... In 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt chose Harry Truman, a relatively unknown senator from Missouri, as his vice presidential running mate. Truman was placed on the ticket in part to appease southern Democrats unhappy with the civil rights positions of Roosevelt's vice president, Henry ...
What's to Become of College Scholarships Earmarked for Blacks?
Apr 01, 2004 ... FOR A CENTURY or more college scholarships earmarked for black students have been a common institutional practice designed to advance the educational opportunities of African Americans. JBHE has assembled and reports here a list of dozens of such awards. Yet today there are serious questions ...
A Black Student Confronts the Racial Legacy of Ole Miss
Apr 01, 2004; ... FROM THE TIME I entered high school, I dreamed of leaving small-town Mississippi. My deepest secret desire was to live anywhere but Mississippi, particularly somewhere that no one knew anything about me. During my senior year, the dream only grew stronger. In small towns like Mount ...
Litany of Horror: A Survey of Newspaper-Reported Lynchings
Apr 01, 2004; ... THE UNITED STATES was born with a political defect from which it may never recover. The enslavement of Africans, while simultaneously expressing the value of liberty, created a duality in the American soul that is maintained in the split between the Wilderness and the Promise. Overcoming this ...
The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners; "Repairing the Hole in Our Soul"
Apr 01, 2004; ... DEBRA DICKERSON'S The End of Blackness is, in many ways, a schizophrenic book. Dickerson riled many on the black left with her 2000 memoir An American Story, in which she dissociated herself from the black leftist orthodoxy despite distrusting the conservative establishment as well. She ...
News and Views; JBHE's Annual Citation Ranking of Black Scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities
Apr 01, 2004 ... In this past winter's issue of JBHE we published rankings of black scholars scored by the number of times their names appeared in the national press during 2003. Princeton's Toni Morrison and Wake Forest's Maya Angelou ranked far ahead of other black scholars in the number of times they were ...
Three Black African Students From Harvard Awarded Rhodes Scholarships
Apr 01, 2004 ... In the Winter issue of JBHE we reported that three African Americans from U.S. universities were awarded 2004 Rhodes scholarships for graduate study at Oxford University. Unlike past years, this year none of the African-American Rhodes scholars were from an Ivy League institution. The three ...
News and Views; New Data on Graduation Rates at Black Colleges: A Dismal Performance Overall, But Two HBCUs Beat Harvard
Apr 01, 2004 ... Nationwide about 39 percent of all African Americans who enter a four-year college go on to cam a diploma at the same institution within six years. If we include black students who transfer to other colleges or take more than six years to complete their degree program, the overall graduation ...
Why Ralph Nader Is a Special Enemy of the 35 Million Black Americans
Apr 01, 2004 ... Possibly blacks have a better reason than Democratic Party voting whites to view Ralph Nader as an election-stealing evil just short of an anti-Christ. National polls say that the 2004 presidential election will be extremely close. If Nader were to poll 3 percent of the vote in key ...
The Battle for Reparations Takes a New Turn
Apr 01, 2004 ... Most people have forgotten that in the late 1960s politicians gave serious consideration to the issue of black reparations. Not so today. There is little interest in the United States Congress to take up the issue of compensatory damages for slavery. Also, there is little likelihood that African ...
Setting the Record Straight on Black Enrollments at Berkeley
Apr 01, 2004 ... In the February issue of Commentary, John H. McWhorter, who is an African American, a widely cited public intellectual, and an associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, criticized some statistical conclusions of Professor Manning Marable, director of black ...
News and Views; Ward Connerly's Falling Star
Apr 01, 2004 ... In 1996 Ward Connerly, the African-American businessman and member of the board of regents of the University of California, led the successful effort to enact Proposition 209, a public referendum that effectively closed down the use of race by any agency of the state government in making hiring, ...
News and Views; Freshmen at Black Colleges Are Moving to the Political Right
Apr 01, 2004 ... Once again, this year we look at a statistical profile comparing the first-year class at America's historically black colleges and universities to American college freshmen generally. Each year the characteristics and attitudes of freshman college students are surveyed by the Cooperative ...
News and Views; The Black Man Who One Day May Become Prime Minister of Great Britain
Apr 01, 2004 ... In the United States, it is widely believed that the first African American, or indeed the first woman, to reach the office of president of the United States will likely come from the Republican Party. This seems to be the case because of general beliefs that only a conservative Republican would ...
News and Views; State of Washington Holds to Its Ban on Race-Sensitive Admissions at Public Universities
Apr 01, 2004 ... In 1998 voters in Washington State approved Proposition 200 which banned all racial preferences on the part of any agency of the state government. This included admissions procedures in the state university system. Early in 2004 Governor Gary Locke, a Democrat, proposed an amendment to ...
News and Views; Colorado May Be the Next Affirmative Action Battleground
Apr 01, 2004 ... Several years ago the Center for Equal Opportunity, a rightwing lobbying group opposed to affirmative action in higher education, published a highly critical report on the admissions procedures at state universities in Colorado. The report concluded that at all state-operated colleges ...
News and Views; Lincoln's Second Inaugural: Press Reactions to the Most Eloquent Presidential Address in American History
Apr 01, 2004 ... President Lincoln's two-minute, 268-word Gettysburg Address of November 19, 1863 is generally considered among the most eloquent orations ever delivered by an American public figure. But many Lincoln scholars believe that his second inaugural address was a more compelling speech. On March 4, ...
Preschool Programs Lead to Greater College Readiness for Black Students
Apr 01, 2004 ... There are many factors contributing to the persistent racial gap in high school grade point averages and scores on standardized tests for college admissions.(*) Some theorists believe that racial differences in prenatal care of the mother may play a significant role in the development of ...
News and Views; How South Carolina's Education Lottery Shortchanges African-American College Students
Apr 01, 2004 ... On January 7, 2002, the state of South Carolina sold its first tickets for a new lottery whose proceeds are earmarked for education. Over the past two years more than $1.5 billion in lottery tickets have been sold and more than $429 million in profits have been designated for the state's ...
News and Views; Blacks Who Are Department Chairs at the Nation's Highest-Ranked Medical Schools
Apr 01, 2004 ... In academic medicine, blacks have made tremendous progress in the past 20 years. In 1980 there were 748 black medical school faculty nationwide, making up 1.7 percent of the total of all medical school faculty in the United States. The latest data from the Association of American Medical ...
News and Views; Two Black Scholars Elected to the National Academy of Engineering
Apr 01, 2004 ... In common with many honorary societies in the United States, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has almost no black members. As is the case with its peer organization, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering states that it has no data on the race of its 2,346 ...
News and Views; When It Comes to Income From Patents, Black Colleges Barely Have Their Toe in the Door
Apr 01, 2004 ... In the 1940s scientists at the University of Pennsylvania developed technology that would become the world's first electronic calculator. The university patented its invention and Penn has subsequently collected millions of dollars in royalties from the dozens of firms that manufacture ...
News and Views; Gratz Ruling Has a Chilling Effect on Black Student Applicants at Flagship State Universities
Apr 01, 2004 ... Last June the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the University of Michigan could continue to use race as a positive factor in its admissions decisions. However, the Court threw out the university's undergraduate admissions formula which in effect gave black applicants with a B grade point average ...
News and Views; Assessing the Progress of African Americans in Academic Chemistry
Apr 01, 2004 ... Ask the average academic chemist at a major research university why there are no African-American chemists teaching at their university. The chances are good that you will get a condescending smile. Possibly the following explains the dismal statistics. According to the National Opinion ...
News and Views; For Low-Income Students, the University of Virginia Substitutes Loans With Grants
Apr 01, 2004 ... This spring Harvard's new financial aid plan has been widely noticed and discussed in the academic world. (See story on page 9 of this issue of JBHE.) Largely unnoticed is the fact that several state universities are also making it easier for low-income students to attend college. Last ...
Sociologist at Northwestern University Provides Solid Evidence for the Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the Job Market
Apr 01, 2004 ... Devah Pager, an assistant professor of sociology at Northwestern University, completed her doctoral studies in the spring of 2002. Her dissertation was entitled, "The Mark of a Criminal Record: The Consequences of Incarceration for Employment Opportunities of Black and White Job Seekers." This ...
News and Views; U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Bullies College Presidents Over Affirmative Action Policies
Apr 01, 2004 ... In late January the presidents of 40 of the nation's most selective colleges and universities received a survey on the letterhead of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. The survey, it was said, was being conducted "to learn how selective colleges are responding to Grutter and Gratz." Now ...
Ted Shaw Named New President of the Legal Defense Fund
Apr 01, 2004 ... Theodore M. Shaw was born in 1954, the same year that the Supreme Court handed down its landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Now 50 years later Shaw has been named president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the organization founded by Thurgood Marshall that led the legal battle in the ...
Black Students Are Beginning to Seize the Early Admission Advantage
Apr 01, 2004 ... IN PAST YEARS college-bound blacks have been much less likely than whites to seek early admission to the nation's highest-ranked colleges and universities. African Americans have avoided making the binding commitment to enroll if accepted because the rules of early decision eliminate their ...
Darryl Hill: The Jackie Robinson of Southern College Football
Apr 01, 2004; ... ON NOVEMBER 16, 1963, 20-year-old Darryl Hill entered "Death Valley," the football stadium at Clemson University, and was greeted by the screams of 30,000 die-hard fans celebrating homecoming. Instead of building the stadium aboveground, the university had, in effect, dug a ditch and dropped the ...
Early African-American Scholars in the Classics: A Photographic Essay
Apr 01, 2004; ... THERE WAS A TIME not so long ago in the United States that the opportunity to obtain even the most rudimentary elements of an education was denied to persons of African descent. After the Civil War, however, this dynamic changed, and across the country black people began to consume with gusto ...
Black Scholars in Middle Eastern Studies
Apr 01, 2004; ... LAST OCTOBER Eve Troutt Powell, a professor at the University of Georgia, was named a MacArthur Foundation fellow. Powell, who is black, earned her Ph.D. at Harvard in Middle Eastern history. At the time of her MacArthur award Professor Powell told reporters that she hoped her work would help ...
Harriet Tubman: An American Idol
Apr 01, 2004; ... IN 1893, U.S. historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared that by 1890 the frontier had officially closed, stating that migration had blurred any clear line of demarcation between settled and unsettled areas. Whatever one thinks of that original claim, the notion of a closing frontier may have ...
Race: The Power of Illusion; Examining the Myth of Race
Apr 01, 2004; ... A THREE-PART videotape documentary entitled Race: The Power of Illusion explores the genetic basis of race, its evolution, and how race still retains its influence in society today. With a powerful narrative by C.C.H. Pounder and interviews with scholars from Harvard University, the University ...
Dorothy Burnett Porter Wesley 1905-1995
Apr 30, 2004
News and Views; JBHE's Annual Citation Ranking of Black Scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities
Apr 30, 2004
News and Views; Harvard's New Financial Aid Plan Highlights the Disappointing Record of America's Leading Universities in Enrolling Low-Income Students
Apr 30, 2004
Three Black African Students From Harvard Awarded Rhodes Scholarships
Apr 30, 2004
News and Views; The Singular Attraction of Professor Cornel West
Apr 30, 2004
News and Views; New Data on Graduation Rates at Black Colleges: A Dismal Performance Overall, But Two HBCUs Beat Harvard
Apr 30, 2004
News and Views; An African-American Law School Professor Aims to Become the Fifth Black U.S. Senator
Apr 30, 2004