The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education back issues from July 2004:
Once Again, Our Favorite Statistic
Jul 01, 2004 ... Essentially there are two views of what is the cause of, and what can be done about, African-American inequality in the United States. The conservative view says that black problems have nothing to do with the issue of civil rights and race discrimination. Instead, it is said that the problems ...
News and Views; Young Blacks at Army Schools Outperform Their Peers in American Public Schools
Jul 01, 2004 ... The United States military is the most racially integrated major institution in America. Blacks make up about 20 percent of enlisted personnel and a significant and growing percentage of all U.S. military officers. At military bases all over the word and in fields of combat, black officers are ...
News and Views; More Than 3.7 Million African Americans Now Hold a Four-Year College Degree
Jul 01, 2004 ... Recently, a subscriber to JBHE called to tell us that he loves our journal but that he wishes it were possible to have fewer articles telling us that life is unfair and that blacks are having trouble making it in college. Well, here is a story that should please that reader. At the time ...
News and Views; The Large and Growing Racial Gap in Law School Admission Test Scores
Jul 01, 2004 ... The Law School Admission Test, known as the LSAT, has become the gold standard in governing law school admissions. Here are the reasons. Law schools, in common with other graduate schools, have a difficult time in detecting the huge differences in grading standards among the 1,000-odd colleges ...
News and Views; Possession of a Four-Year College Degree Brings Blacks Close to Economic Parity With Whites
Jul 01, 2004 ... New figures released this summer by the U.S. Census Bureau unequivocally show the huge power of higher education to influence me closing of the economic gap between blacks and whites who have completed college. Let's consider first how improved educational attainment advances the incomes ...
News and Views; Endowment Wealth: The Huge Disadvantage of the Black Colleges
Jul 01, 2004 ... For the majority of the nation's predominantly black colleges the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education ushered in a 50-year period of competitive struggle and in many cases academic decline. The forces at work are well known. In the pre-Brown years of Jim Crow the black ...
News and Views; The College Dropout Problem Is Not A Simple Matter of Race
Jul 01, 2004 ... According to the most recent figures, the nationwide college graduation rate for black students stands at an appallingly low rate of 39 percent. This figure is 21 percentage points below the 60 percent for white students. These figures have led a number of people to the conclusion that the ...
The Undoing of a Colonial Myth
Jul 01, 2004 ... Belgium's Royal Museum for Central Africa was founded by King Leopold II in 1897. The museum houses valuable collections of African artifacts, plant and animal specimens, photographs, and artwork. To this day, the museum, as well as the Belgian nation as a whole, has celebrated the ...
News and Views; The Day Langston Hughes Instructed Joe McCarthy About Going to School in a Racially Segregated America
Jul 01, 2004 ... Surprise! Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was a liberal on most racial issues. In fact, McCarthy had been a strong supporter of federal antilynching legislation, a measure that was never enacted because of opposition from southern Democrats. When campaigning for election to the ...
News and Views; Three African Americans Elected to the National Academy of Sciences
Jul 01, 2004 ... Each year the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS) selects new members who in the academy's judgment have made the greatest contribution to scientific research, including social science research. Election to the academy is an extraordinary honor and is often seen as the pinnacle of a ...
News and Views; Deep Springs College: The Nation's Most Selective and Almost All White College
Jul 01, 2004 ... Deep Springs College is an all-male institution located on an old cattle ranch in the high California desert. It is one of the most selective colleges in the nation. This past year only 10 percent of all applicants were accepted, a rate similar to the acceptance rate at Harvard and Yale ....
News and Views; Three African-American Students Awarded Truman Scholarships
Jul 01, 2004 ... The Harry S. Truman Scholarship program was established by Congress in 1975 as an official U.S. government memorial to honor the nation's thirty-third president. Each year approximately 80 Truman scholarships are awarded -- usually at least one from each state -- to college juniors who are ...
News and Views; More College-Educated African Americans Are Pulling Up Stakes to Better Their Economic Opportunities
Jul 01, 2004 ... In 1900, 90 percent of the black population in the United States lived in the largely agrarian South. Over the next seven decades, there was a huge migration of southern blacks to the cities of the North and Midwest in search of industrial jobs and less hostile race relations. By 1970 less than ...
News and Views; Racial Differences in Alcohol Use and Abuse Among College Students
Jul 01, 2004 ... The latest annual survey conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA found that students at the nation's historically black colleges and universities were less than one third as likely as college students generally to drink beer. The survey also found that while one half of all ...
The Unsolved Murder of Edwin T. Pratt
Jul 01, 2004 ... This past January marked the 35th anniversary of the murder of Edwin T. Pratt. Pratt was head of the Seattle chapter of the National Urban League when he was killed in January 1969 by a shotgun blast to the face as he responded to a knock at his front door. Pratt was 38 years ...
News and Views; A Black Scholar Reaches for the Stars in the Republic of South Africa
Jul 01, 2004 ... Early Africans saw and recorded heavenly constellations of giraffes, lions, and zebras while other ancient peoples saw the bull, ram, fish, goat, and crab constellations with which every American school child is familiar. In fact, early Africans were students of the heavens. The earliest ...
News and Views; How College Basketball Paved the Way for Racial Integration at Mississippi State University
Jul 01, 2004 ... In college sports, Jim Crow is long gone. The 2004 Mississippi State University men's basketball team won the Southeastern Conference championship and was seeded second in one of the four regional tournaments for the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball championship. Nine of the ...
News and Views; California State University at Sacramento Looks to Exorcise the Ghosts of a Racist Past
Jul 01, 2004 ... On the north side of the campus of California State University at Sacramento is a three-acre field named the C.M. Goethe Arboretum. It is named after Charles M. Goethe, who was a major benefactor of the university until his death in 1966. The problem is that C.M. Goethe was also a racist and a ...
News and Views; Should the Ku Klux Klan Be Permitted to Distribute Literature on America's College Campuses?
Jul 01, 2004 ... In the Spring issue of JBHE we noted the continuing racial controversy at the University of Louisville.(*) At this state-operated university in Kentucky, James R. Ramsey, the president of the institution, permitted members of the Ku Klux Klan to distribute literature in designated areas of the ...
News and Views; Brown University Shows Major Gains in Its Numbers of Black Faculty
Jul 01, 2004 ... The latest JBHE survey found that 3.7 percent of the total faculty at Brown University is black. This put Brown in fifth place among the nation's 25 highest-ranked universities in its level of black faculty. The survey also showed that 4.1 percent of the tenured faculty at Brown was black. Among ...
News and Views; Bill Cosby Is Telling Only Part of the Story
Jul 01, 2004 ... Bill Cosby has been bashing young blacks about using bad words and poor grammar, and their lousy performance in high school. Speaking at Constitution Hall in Washington at an event celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Cosby said, "They're ...
Is Harvard University Losing Its Enthusiasm for Black Studies?
Jul 01, 2004 ... In Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mystery Silver Blaze, the most important clue for the great detective was something that did not happen. Holmes fans will recall that the watchdog did not bark. This enabled Holmes to deduce that the theft of the great race horse Silver Blaze was ...
Charles T. Duncan 1925-2004
Jul 01, 2004 ... Charles T. Duncan, civil rights attorney and former dean of the law school at Howard University, died this past May from obstructive pulmonary disease. He was 79 years old. At birth in Washington, D.C., Duncan was named Charles Andrew Tignor. He later took the name of his adoptive ...
Stanford's Snail-Like Progress in Hiring Black Faculty
Jul 01, 2004 ... A new report released by the provost of Stanford University reveals that the black percentage of the total faculty at Stanford has shown no improvement over the past decade. Eleven years ago, in 1993, there were 38 black faculty members at Stanford. They then made up slightly more than 2 ...
Wit and Wisdom from Black Commencement Speakers in the Spring of 2004
Jul 01, 2004 ... Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate and Robert Goheen Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, addressing the graduating students at Wellesley College: "I'm not going to talk about the future because I'm not even certain that it exists. I'm not certain that a burgeoning ménage à ...
College-Bound Black Students Are Making Inroads in Advanced Placement Tests
Jul 01, 2004 ... THIS PAST WINTER the film The Perfect Score told the story of a group of six students who were obsessed with getting into the best colleges. Their solution was a plot to steal the answers to the SAT test. The students rationalized their strategy by expressing that the acronym SAT meant "sick and ...
Black Presidents of Predominantly White Academic Associations, 1946-2004
Jul 01, 2004; ... THE EARLIEST KNOWN African American to head a predominantly white professional/scholarly organization was George Franklin Grant. In 1871 Grant graduated from the Harvard dental school and became the university's first faculty member of African descent. By 1881, when he was elected to lead the ...
Faculty Profile: Caryl Phillips
Jul 01, 2004 ... Tall and handsome, he speaks with a British accent. Many New Yorkers mistake Caryl Phillips for a United Nations diplomat. But, of course, this Barnard College professor is a star in black literature. Author of seven novels and three works of nonfiction, Phillips explores the sense of ...
Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform; Brown v. Board of Education: A Magnificent Mirage?
Jul 01, 2004; ... OVER THE PAST year the nation has indulged in a spectacle of hoopla and fanfare commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Though ostensibly a celebration of the triumph of democracy over the forces of racism, in this national revelry we can discern the fabrication of ...
John Henry Hopps Jr. 1939-2004
Jul 01, 2004 ... Noted physicist, government official, and educator John Henry Hopps Jr. died this past May from acute respiratory failure. He was 65 years old. Walter Massey, current president of Morehouse College and Hopps' roommate when they were undergraduates at Morehouse, said Hopps was "one of the ...
Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown; FDR Set the Foundation for Public School Integration
Jul 01, 2004 ... TODAY, FRANKLIN Delano Roosevelt is held in the highest esteem by African Americans. Among almost all black Americans, President Roosevelt's New Deal policies are perceived to have rescued a huge number of poor blacks from the crushing poverty of the Great Depression. In fact, a number of the ...
The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost; Harold Bloom's All-White Dead Poets Society
Jul 01, 2004 ... IN 1994 HAROLD Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale, and arguably the most important -- and surely the best read -- literary commentator of our times, authored The Western Canon: Books and Schools of the Ages. In this book Bloom produced a list of hundreds of canonical books -- ...
Solomon Carter Fuller 1872-1953
Jul 01, 2004 ... Solomon Carter Fuller was the nation's first black psychiatrist and a pioneer in the study of Alzheimer's disease. He was an early member of the American Psychiatric Association. His portrait hangs with those of the organization's founders in the APA headquarters building in Washington, D.C ....
News and Views; The Sharp Drop in Blacks Admitted to the University of California
Jul 01, 2004 ... State law in California prohibits the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions to the state university system. Yet, despite the imposition of race-neutral admissions, a study conducted by the research staff at the University of California reports that black and Latino applicants continue ...
News and Views; A Troubling Increase in Murder Rates on Black College Campuses
Jul 01, 2004 ... In late April of this year Jonathan Glenn, an 18-year-old black student majoring in business at Edward Waters College, a predominantly black school in Jacksonville, Florida, turned in a paper on campus crime to a professor in his communications class. The paper pointed out that according to new ...
African Americans in the Western States Are More Likely to Be College Educated
Jul 01, 2004 ... Nationwide about 15 percent of all adult African Americans hold a college degree. For whites, the figure is 27.8 percent, almost double the rate for blacks. But there are vast differences in the educational attainment of blacks and whites depending on the region of the country in which ...
News and Views; Condoleezza Rice's Virtuoso Performance Before the National Commission on Terrorism: She Turns Racial Stereotypes Upside Down
Jul 01, 2004 ... Ogden Nash once wrote, "I cannot help mentioning that the door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly." According to Nash's theory, Condoleezza Rice's powerful and accomplished testimony this past April before ...
News and Views; Business Week Erroneously Declares a Free-Fall in African-American College Enrollments at Elite Colleges
Jul 01, 2004 ... Business Week recently published a commentary entitled "Why African Americans Are Shying Away From Top Colleges." The article said that "blacks are turning their backs on some of the country's elite institutions." To make the case, the writer pointed out that black applicants were down 10 ...
News and Views; How the Black Vote Can Influence -- and Could Possibly Control -- the Outcome of the 2004 Presidential Election
Jul 01, 2004 ... The 2000 presidential election was one of the closest in the nation's history. If just 538 additional black voters in Florida had gone to the polls and cast their ballots for Al Gore, the former vice president would now be in the Oval Office. In that election, more than 540,000 eligible black ...
News and Views; The Racial Digital Divide: A Narrowing Rift in the Classroom But Still a Chasm in the American Home
Jul 01, 2004 ... All of us, black and nonblack alike, live in a world in which economic survival or success depends in large part on the behavior of others, In order to influence this behavior, human intelligence must continually grasp, store, and decode countless signals and varieties of ...
News and Views; Not in My Backyard: Where Whites Have Built Black Colleges
Jul 01, 2004 ... We all know about the public outcry that occurs when it is proposed that a power plant, prison, airport, mental hospital, landfill, or low-income housing development be built near an established business or residential community. This "not-in-my-backyard" mentality was also firmly in place when ...
"I Am Not Equal to White People"
Jul 01, 2004 ... Eslanda Robeson was the wife of Paul Robeson, the All-American football player at Rutgers University and famed singer and acton Aside from Langston Hughes, she was the only other African American called before the McCarthy committee. She had met Paul Robeson in 1921 when they were both ...
News and Views; The Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT May Be Wider Than the Official Statistics Show
Jul 01, 2004 ... In 2003 The College Board reported that the mean combined score on the SAT for black students was 857. This was 206 points below the mean score for white students. But these figures are applicable only to the 1,050,977 test takers who identified their race or ethnic background. The College Board ...
Two University Psychologists Explore Racial Prejudices Rooted in the Human Psyche
Jul 01, 2004 ... Recent research published in the journal Psychological Science provides evidence suggesting that racial bias lingers below the surface even among individuals who profess strong beliefs in racial equality. In two different experiments, psychologist Galen Bodenhausen of Northwestern ...
Blacks Are a Little More Than One Percent of Goldwater Scholars
Jul 01, 2004 ... Barry Goldwater, the famed U.S. senator from Arizona and 1964 GOP presidential nominee, was a dedicated promoter of scientific and engineering research. His home in Arizona had a high-tech flagpole which would automatically raise the Stars and Stripes when the first rays of sunlight hit the pole ...
News and Views; Why Suburban Blacks From Affluent Families Fail to Close the Racial Gap in SAT Scores
Jul 01, 2004 ... Prince George's County in Maryland includes many suburban towns on the outskirts of the nation's capital. Blacks make up 62.7 percent of the county's population. Prince George's County has the highest median income for African Americans of any county in the United States. Similarly, ...
News and Views; Higher Education Adds to the Marriage Probabilities of Black Women
Jul 01, 2004 ... A paper by Elaina Rose, an associate professor of economics at the University of Washington, concludes that educational attainment has now become less of a bar to the marriage of women than was the case several decades ago. Her findings are that almost 25 years ago, in 1980, women of all races ...
News and Views; Exceptions to the JBHE Rule: Not All African Americans Need a College Diploma for Economic Success
Jul 01, 2004 ... African Americans who complete college have, on average, annual incomes that are double those of blacks who claim only a high school education. The median family income of blacks in the U.S. is only 63 percent of the median white family income. But for those blacks who have completed ...
New College Guide Includes Seven HBCUs
Jul 01, 2004 ... The Princeton Review's publication The Best 351 Colleges has become one of the nation's most popular guides for college-bound students. Among the historically black colleges and universities that make the cut into the 2004 edition are Howard University, Spelman College, Morehouse College, Fisk ...
News and Views; Three New African-American Members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Jul 01, 2004 ... The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the most distinguished associations of scholars and dignitaries in the United States. But throughout much of its history the academy was an all-white organization. Even today, finding a black face among the society's 4,000 members is a ...
News and Views; Almost No Black Editors on the Staffs of Student Newspapers at Universities With Programs in Journalism
Jul 01, 2004 ... In the Winter 2003/2004 issue of JBHE, we published the results of our survey on the racial diversity of the newsrooms at the student newspapers of the nation's highest-ranked universities. Newspapers at 19 of the nation's 25 highest-ranked universities responded to our survey. Overall our ...
News and Views; The Severe and Nationwide Decline in the Number of Black Faculty at American Colleges and Universities
Jul 01, 2004 ... Nearly a decade ago, in 1993, according to the Labor Department, there were slightly more than 37,000 blacks teaching at the college level.(*) Over the next four years the number of black people teaching at American colleges and universities grew by nearly 20,000 to 56,485, a huge rise of 53 ...
News and Views; Bob Grant: Talk-Radio's Resident Racist
Jul 01, 2004 ... Bob Grant is king of programming that is widely referred to as hate radio. His nationally syndicated afternoon talk show airs on WOR-AM Radio in New York City sandwiched between the radio shows of well-known conservatives Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage. Grant says that he is not a racist, but ...
News and Views; The College Prospects for Graduates of Crime-Ridden Inner-City High Schools
Jul 01, 2004 ... The New York City Police Department recently released figures for crime rates at the hundreds of high schools in the city. The Prospect Heights High School in Brooklyn had the city's highest crime rate with 37.8 felonies and misdemeanors reported per 1,000 students. Nearly 90 percent of the ...
Grutter: Where Do We Go From Here?
Jul 01, 2004; ... THE LEGISLATIVE CHALLENGES to race-sensitive admissions policies in California and Washington, and the challenge posed by the Hopwood case in Texas, all pale in comparison to the importance of the two University of Michigan cases heard by the U.S. Supreme Court last year. Before the decision, ...
Brown Babies at Stanford in the Early 1970s
Jul 01, 2004; ... VIRTUALLY ALL OF the black freshmen who arrived at Stanford in the fall of 1971 were born near the time that the Brown decision was issued in 1954. We were, in every sense of the word, Brown babies, and we came to Stanford from every conceivable community in the country. Some came from ...
Tokens and Triumphs: Honorary Degree Awards for Blacks at the Nation's Highest-Ranked Colleges and Universities (2004)
Jul 01, 2004 ... IN 1804 LEMUEL HAYNES, a minister in the Congregational Church and a veteran of Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys of the Revolutionary War, won an honorary degree from Middlebury College. Haynes was the first black person to be awarded an honorary degree by an American college or ...
The Rocky Road to Racial Integration at the University of Colorado
Jul 01, 2004; ... THE COLORADO STATE Constitution of 1876 forbade "any distinction or classification of pupils be made on account of race or color" in public educational institutions. Statutes of the University of Colorado overtly referred to this constitutional requirement for 60 years. Nevertheless, both the ...
The Solid Core of States That Persist in Protecting Racially Segregated Higher Education
Jul 01, 2004 ... BY THE LATE 1800s the racial reforms of the Reconstruction period had come to an end. The states in the Old Confederacy and several border states established racially segregated public higher education systems. In the Deep South racial segregation of public higher education was obligatory and ...
Race: The Reality of Human Differences; A Fable Masquerading as a Work of Science
Jul 01, 2004; ... RACE: THE REALITY of Human Differences has a story to tell, and it tells it in an unmistakably straightforward way. Here it is. In 1954, with the Supreme Court's decision of Brown v. Board of Education, the United States embarked on a mission to achieve equality between the races. Sixty years ...
With All Deliberate Speed: The Life of Philip Elman; The Government's Civil Rights Man
Jul 01, 2004; ... DURING THIS SEASON of ongoing commemoration of Brown v. Board of Education, an oft-repeated story involves the ascension of Earl Warren to the Supreme Court after the sudden death of Chief Justice Fred Vinson. Before Vinson died, the Court heard its first round of arguments in Brown. Prior to ...
African American Lives; A Who's Who of Notable African Americans
Jul 01, 2004 ... EACH MAY Ebony magazine publishes a list of the "100 Most Influential African Americans." In searching the United States for leading black figures Ebony does a bad job. Obscure politicians and figurehead leaders of black shriners organizations routinely appear on the Ebony list of the most ...
A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow; The Commanding Role of Religion in the Defeat of Racial Segregation
Jul 01, 2004 ... The civil rights movement in the United States is seen by most historians as a great triumph of liberalism. According to the standard view, white liberals in the North, joining forces with masses of African Americans, succeeded in persuading a nation that racial segregation was in complete ...
Donald Anderson 1932-2004
Jul 01, 2004 ... Donald Anderson, author of ground-breaking anti-poverty legislation of the 1960s, died earlier this year from lung cancer. He was 71 years old. Donald Anderson's father was a biologist and a physician. As a youth, Donald Anderson attended the elite Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., ...
Solomon Carter Fuller 1872-1953
Jul 31, 2004