The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education back issues from April 2005:
Black Historian to Head Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture
Apr 01, 2005 ... This past March, Lonnie G. Bunch was named the founding director of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. The yet-to-be-built facility will be part of the Smithsonian Institution. Bunch is a native of Newark, New Jersey. After finishing high school in Belleville, ...
A Dream of Freedom: The Civil Rights Movement From 1954 to 1968; Unfinished Business
Apr 01, 2005; ... NEARLY A CENTURY after the Civil War, on new battlefields -- Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham, Jackson, Little Rock, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, for example -- another war was fought over the meaning of freedom. The United States had assumed the role of defender of the "free world," and the ...
The Higher Education Credentials of President Bush's Appointments of Judges Who Are Black
Apr 01, 2005 ... In the course of the eight years of the Clinton administration, 61 African Americans were appointed to the federal bench. They made up 16 percent of all of President Clinton's federal judicial appointments. In President Bush's first term, 15 blacks were among his 200 appointments of ...
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age; When the Ku Klux Klan Ruled Detroit
Apr 01, 2005; ... IN 1925 THE city of Detroit was far different from the metropolis that we know today. The city's factories were producing mass quantities of new cars. The automobile work force was predominantly white, many of whom were immigrants from the South. In 1925 the 80,000 blacks who lived in Detroit ...
Charles Spurgeon Johnson 1893-1956
Apr 01, 2005; ... This issue of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education is dedicated to the memory of Charles Spurgeon Johnson 1893-1956 One of the nation's earliest authorities on race relations in the United States, Charles Spurgeon Johnson was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. As ...
Our Favorite Statistic Revisited
Apr 01, 2005; ... 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 ...
Ossie Davis 1917-2005
Apr 01, 2005; ... "He took the bad part of the South out of me. My heroes were a lot of John Waynes. I know what a man is because of Ossie." - Burt Reynolds, speaking at the memorial service for Ossie Davis in New York City, February 12, 2005 Forty years ago, Ossie Davis, the award-winning actor, ...
The Chancellor of the University of Swaziland
Apr 01, 2005; ... King Mswati III of Swaziland is the last of the reigning monarchs in sub-Saharan Africa. Educated at the Shelboume preparatory school in Britain, the king, now 36 years old, also holds the title of chancellor of the University of Swaziland. Unlike his royal counterparts in Europe who are ...
David Graham Du Bois 1925-2005
Apr 01, 2005; ... David Du Bois, stepson of W.E.B. Du Bois, JBHE contributor, and former professor of Afro-American studies and journalism at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, died this past January at a hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts. Professor Du Bois suffered from emphysema. He was 79 years ...
Black Men Have Fallen Severely Behind in College Enrollments
Apr 01, 2005; ... Here is perhaps the most ominous news since the 1965 Moynihan Report on the black family. Today there are nearly 1.8 million African Americans enrolled in colleges and universities in the United States. Black enrollments in higher education have increased 37 percent over the past ...
The Rise and Fall of The Bell Curve
Apr 01, 2005; ... In a widely publicized event, The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray was published in October 1994. This 845-page book was a racial bombshell. Stacked with statistical tables and hundreds of footnotes, the book argued that on average blacks have IQs that are 15 percent lower ...
Harvard Loses Another Important Black Scholar
Apr 01, 2005; ... In pan to lessen the damage from the departure of Cornel West and K. Anthony Appiah to Princeton, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. recruited political scientist Michael C. Dawson to Cambridge. Now Dawson, too, is planning to leave Harvard. Michael C. Dawson, 52, who Professor Henry Louis ...
Separate and Unequal: Two Black Student Pioneers Who Were Treated as Social Pariahs at Predominantly White Universities
Apr 01, 2005; ... In 1948 George W. McLaurin, a black man, applied to the graduate school of the University of Oklahoma in Norman. McLaurin was a retired schoolteacher who aimed for a doctorate in education. As expected, he was denied admission under the Oklahoma statute which made it illegal to attend, teach at ...
Black Actors Have A Banner Year at the 2005 Academy Awards
Apr 01, 2005; ... In the early years of Hollywood, black actors appeared almost exclusively as maids, bellhops, or second-rate criminals. Even when black characters appeared in serious film roles, the parts were often played by white actors in blackface. Later, when black actors finally were assigned roles in ...
Henry Gates Will Step Down From Black Studies Chair Next Year: But He Has a Lot of Unfinished Business
Apr 01, 2005; ... In an interview in late April, Henry Louis Gates Jr. told JBHE that he will step down as chair of the African and African-American studies department at Harvard next year. "It has always been my plan to stay no longer than 15 years as chair," Professor Gates told JBHE. But he also said that he ...
A Novel Approach to Recruiting Black Students
Apr 01, 2005; ... Roderick J. McDavis, president of Ohio University in Athens, is one of a handful of African Americans currently serving as the leader of a predominantly white state university. Yet Ohio University falls far short of the level of black enrollments that would be expected at a state-operated ...
JBHE's Ranking of the Long-Term Performance of the Nation's Highest-Ranked Liberal Arts Colleges in Enrolling Low-Income Students
Apr 01, 2005; ... IT IS WELL recognized that over recent years the drive for campus diversity has come to compete with established standards of academic merit in many of the choices made by institutions in higher education. Almost all colleges and universities in the United States now place major emphasis on ...
The Early Origins of Spelman College
Apr 01, 2005; ... Today Spelman College in Atlanta is universally regarded as a highly prestigious institution of higher learning for African-American women. But it was more than 100 years after its founding in a church basement that a black woman was named as college president. SPELMAN COLLEGE, the ...
African-American Pioneers in Veterinary Education
Apr 01, 2005; ... As in other professional and scientific fields, Jim Crow took precedence over academic merit. FROM 1889 TO 1948, a total of only 70 African-American veterinarians graduated from veterinary colleges in the United States and Canada. It is noteworthy that Kansas State University led the way ...
Nineteenth-Century Black Graduates of Harvard Medical School
Apr 01, 2005; ... Before any African American had earned a diploma from Harvard College, black students were graduating from Harvard Medical School. In the final three decades of the nineteenth century, eight black men had earned their medical degrees from Harvard University. IN LATE OCTOBER 1850 the ...
A JBHE Check-Up on Blacks in U.S. Medical Schools
Apr 01, 2005; ... There is widespread agreement on the urgency in the United States of training more black medical professionals. But the bad news is that instead of an increasing number of blacks in medical schools, recent years have seen a significant drop in overall African-American enrollments in U.S. medical ...
The Surge in African-American Enrollments in Advanced Placement Courses
Apr 01, 2005; ... Too often the statistics we report in this journal leave our readers craving for just a few morsels of positive news that blacks are making educational progress in the United States. We are pleased to report that new statistics on black participation in the Advanced Placement program are a feast ...
Now Home-Schooled Black Children Perform as Well as Home-Schooled Whites
Apr 01, 2005; ... In the Jim Crow era black children in the South who were lucky enough to go to school often attended classes which were in session only in the mid-winter months when there was no work to he done in the fields. In the fall and spring months, many black parents would continue their children's ...
Sunday Services at Bethune-Cookman College
Apr 01, 2005; ... A daughter of former slaves, Mary McLeod Bethune was educated at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. In 1904 she made a down payment on land that served as the city dump in Daytona, Florida. On that site she founded the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls, which was ...
Nathan Wright Jr. 1923-2005
Apr 01, 2005; ... Nathan Wright Jr., educator, minister, author, and black power advocate, died this past winter from kidney failure at his home in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. He was 81 years old. Wright was a native of Shreveport, Louisiana, but grew up in Cincinnati. He was the fourth generation in ...
Bert Williams: The African-American Minstrel
Apr 01, 2005; ... "He was the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew. " - W.C. Fields Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century the minstrel show delighted white audiences across the United States. White comedians blackened their faces with burnt cork and gallivanted ...
There Are Now Three Databases for Measuring the Impact of Black Scholars: But Always the Popularity Contest Remains
Apr 01, 2005; ... Modern database technology permits computers to rank black scholars by a wide variety of measures. Some of these yardsticks may be a bit silly but others offer valuable insights as to how academic peers view the scholarship of black professors. IN EACH OF the past nine years JBHE has ...
Harold Cruse 1916-2005
Apr 01, 2005; ... "Although Cruse wasn't a trained professor, he was the quintessential professor." Harold Cruse, the outspoken social critic and professor emeritus of history at the University of Michigan, died this past March of congestive heart failure at an assisted living facility in Ann Arbor. He ...
The White Man Who Was the Father of Black Studies in the United States
Apr 01, 2005; ... The White Man Who Was the Father of Black Studies in the United States Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge by Jerry Gershenhorn (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 338 pages, $65.00) MELVILLE J. HERSKOVITS, a white man, was the son of Central European Jewish ...
The Persisting Myth That the Black Colleges Are Becoming Whiter
Apr 01, 2005; ... "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. " - Winston Churchill This past March, Ed Gordon, a host on National Public Radio, opened an NPR segment with the following statement: "More whites are enrolling at historically black colleges ...
Degree Attainments of African Americans: The Good and the Bad
Apr 01, 2005; ... Today nearly 4 million African Americans hold a four-year college degree. The big and worsening problem is that a large majority of these degrees have been earned by black women. First the good news: At the time of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, at best 10,000 American blacks - one ...
How Putting an End to Race-Sensitive Admissions at the Nation's Top Law Schools Would Affect the Legal Profession
Apr 01, 2005; ... Conservatives have mounted a new, and in some cases deceitful, effort to abolish affirmative action in law school admissions. Here is the likely outcome if their efforts succeed. In recent months conservatives have launched a determined effort to abolish affirmative action admissions ...
Holding a Four-Year College Degree Brings Blacks Close to Economic Parity With Whites
Apr 01, 2005; ... New statistics from the Census Bureau confirm the powerful economic advantage that accrues to African Americans who hold a four-year college degree. Current figures for the year 2004 show that blacks with a college diploma now have a median income that is 95 percent of the median income of ...
Black Student Graduation Rates at the Nation's Selective Liberal Arts Colleges Are Much Higher Than the Nationwide Average
Apr 01, 2005; ... Black students at the highly selective liberal arts colleges have a relatively high graduation rate. The gap in graduation rates at these schools between blacks and whites is considerably smaller than the national average. Once more, we turn to the critical and always depressing issue of ...
Bruce McMarion Wright 1918-2005
Apr 01, 2005; ... Although admitted to Princeton University he was not permitted to matriculate. Discovering that he was black, Princeton officials told him he would be happier with others of his race. Bruce Wright, a retired judge, poet, author, and an outspoken critic of a criminal justice system which ...
Where the Racial Gap in Internet Access Continues to Be a Chasm
Apr 01, 2005; ... While it appears that the racial Internet gap in the nation's schools may have almost closed, a huge racial chasm persists between blacks and whites in Internet access at home. Here blacks continue to trail whites by a very large margin. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 31.1 percent of ...
The Supreme Court Justice Who Refused to Go to a Christmas Party That Included Black Employees
Apr 01, 2005; ... "Individual justices are also able to make changes on the Court aside from their opinions. In 1947 the Supreme Court clerks planned a Christmas party that would have included the black employees of the Court. Justice Stanley Reed objected, declaring he would not come to such a party. Justice ...
Who's to Blame for the Racial Gap in Educational Achievement?
Apr 01, 2005; ... Ronald F. Ferguson is lecturer in public policy at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government and director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University. His research finds that black parents must share some of the blame for the educational ...
The High-Ranking Liberal Arts Colleges Where Black Students Stand the Best Chance of Admission
Apr 01, 2005; ... Long-term statistics show that at the vast majority of the nation's 25 highest-ranking liberal arts colleges, no less one third of all black applicants are accepted for admission. These acceptance rates have held true in each of the past 10 years. Also, more than one half of all black applicants ...
Is It Possible That a Computer Can Detect Whether You Are Racist?
Apr 01, 2005; ... Psychologists from Harvard and the University of Washington have developed a test that they claim effectively determines if a person has hidden racial biases. A very small percentage of Americans today would admit to being racist. Except among the fringe element of white supremacists in ...
The Once Huge Racial Gap in Internet Access at Public Schools Has Nearly Disappeared
Apr 01, 2005; ... In the early years of the digital age, America's predominantly white public schools were first to win access to Internet technology. But over the course of the past decade, schools with large numbers of black and other minority students have closed the gap. These schools now appear to have ...
Department of Education Works Out the Kinks in Its Graduation Rate Reporting System
Apr 01, 2005; ... In March 2003, for the first time, the Department of Education published on its Web site the student graduation rates for thousands of educational institutions in the United States. JBHE detected some suspect numbers in the 2003 Department of Education graduation rate data for several black ...
JBHE's Annual Ranking of Black Scholars in the Social Sciences and the Humanities
Apr 01, 2005; ... For the eleventh consecutive year, the leader in the JBHE citation ranking of black scholars in the social sciences is Harvard's University Professor William Julius Wilson. Among black scholars in the humanities, Professor Paul Gilroy of Yale regained the top spot he held two years ...
No Blacks Among the 5,000 Most Cited Scholars in the Natural and Social Sciences
Apr 01, 2005; ... Philadelphia's widely recognized Institute for Scientific Information has identified the 250 most highly cited scholars worldwide in 21 different fields in the natural and social sciences. According to JBHE's analysis of the list, not one of these highly cited individuals is an African ...
Harvard Economist Concludes That Blacks in Charter Schools Are Outperforming Their Peers in Regular Public Schools
Apr 01, 2005; ... Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Harvard who is an African American, expresses views at variance with most of the civil rights establishment. Hoxby is a major scholar and her research showing superior academic performance of black students in charter schools must be treated with ...
How California's Proposition 209 Created a Crisis in African-American Higher Education
Apr 01, 2005; ... NINE YEARS AGO the people of California passed Proposition 209 in what I believe was a sincere effort to foster nondiscrimination in the state. However, 209's supporters do not see what I see every day as the new chancellor at UC Berkeley. Instead of ensuring nondiscrimination, ...
Vital Signs
Apr 01, 2005; ... The Statistics That Describe the Present and Suggest the Future of African Americans in Higher Education Each issue of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education presents a statistical record of the progress of African Americans in institutions of higher education in the United ...
For College Freshmen, Race Is Becoming Less of an Issue
Apr 01, 2005; ... Each year for the past four decades, researchers at UCLA have surveyed the opinions of incoming college freshmen on a variety of issues. This year, it appears that racial issues are less of a concern than in past years. Once again, this year we look at a statistical profile comparing the ...
Why I Left Harvard University
Apr 01, 2005; ... Editor's Note: Over the past three and a half years more than 1,000 articles and op-ed commentaries have been published on the 2001 controversy between Professor Cornel West and Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, which resulted in Professor West's leaving Harvard for Princeton. Here ...
Good News! Nearly Two Million Black Americans Are Currently Enrolled in Higher Education
Apr 01, 2005; ... A new report from the Department of Education offers an impressive picture of black enrollments at all levels of higher education in the United States. But black men are still lagging black women who now make up nearly two thirds of all African-American enrollments. A new report from the ...
Among the Black Colleges, Fisk and Spelman Are Producing the Highest Student Graduation Rates
Apr 01, 2005; ... At a very large majority of the nation's historically black colleges and universities fewer than one half of all students who enroll go on to graduate. At eight HBCUs, the black student graduation rate comes in below 20 percent. Fisk University and Spelman College have a relatively good black ...
The Alabama College That First Broke the Color Barrier
Apr 01, 2005; ... While often shamelessly trafficking in integrationist theater, the state of Alabama continues to declare that it wants to desegregate its higher education system. Meantime at Spring Hill College in Mobile, blacks and whites have been attending classes together for more than half a ...
Tracking the Progress of African Americans on the Editorial Rolls of America's Most Prestigious Law Journal
Apr 01, 2005; ... Over the 118-year history of the Harvard Law Review, many thousands of America's most gifted law students have served on the editorial board of the nation's most prestigious law journal. Recent JBHE research determined that of the thousands of past editors only 26 have been black. This ...
When the Ku Klux Klan Ruled Detroit
Apr 01, 2005; ... When the Ku Klux Klan Ruled Detroit Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle (New York: Henry Holt, 432 pages, $26.00) IN 1925 THE city of Detroit was far different from the metropolis that we know today. The city's factories were producing ...
Documenting the Black Experience at Yale University
Apr 01, 2005; ... Documenting the Black Experience at Yale University Still Black, At Yale a film by Monique Wallon and Andia N. R. Winslow (WaltonWinslow Productions, 34 minutes) IN THE FALL of 2000, two black university students - Monique Walton and Andia N.R. Winslow - embarked on a class research ...
Scholarly Research on Blacks in Higher Education
Apr 01, 2005; ... Tendencies of African-American College Students in Seeking Counseling Services "An Exploratory Study of Help-seeking Attitudes and Coping Strategies Among College Students by Race and Gender" by Hung-Bin Sheu and William E. Sedlacek of the University of Maryland at College Park. This ...
Black Digest of Literature
Apr 01, 2005; ... Recent Books by African Americans or About the African-American Experience * Alexander Jr., Rudolph, Racism, African Americans, and Social Justice (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) * Ater, Renee, Keith Morrison, the David C. Driskell Series of African-American Art, Volume V ...
Appointments, Tenure Decisions, and Promotions of African Americans in Higher Education
Apr 01, 2005; ... Clementine S. Cone was promoted to vice president for administration and finance at Virginia State University, the historically black institution in Petersburg. She previously served as executive assistant to the president of the university. Carmen Coustaut was appointed associate vice ...
Notable Honors and Awards
Apr 01, 2005; ... Walter Bland, associate professor of psychiatry at the Howard University College of Medicine, has received the Nancy C.A. Roeske M.D. Certificate of Recognition for Excellence in Medical Student Education from the American Psychiatric Association. Julius L. Chambers, civil rights ...
A Black Student Struggles to Pay for a Berkeley Education
Apr 01, 2005; ... IT WAS NOT that long ago - not as long ago as you'd think - that the University of California at Berkeley cost $212.50 a quarter. When it went up to $236, there was serious debate in the Daily Californian as to whether it would cause the unfortunate to drop out, at the least, or cause blood in ...
Unfinished Business
Apr 01, 2005; ... Unfinished Business A Dream of Freedom: The Civil Rights Movement From 1954 to 1968 by Diane McWhorter (New York: Scholastic Books, 160 pages, $19.95) NEARLY A CENTURY after the Civil War, on new battlefields - Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham, Jackson, Little Rock, Chicago, Boston, Los ...
Race Relations on Campus
Apr 01, 2005; ... A national record of racial incidents at the nation's institutions of higher education. Race Relations Database Students, faculty, and administrators are encouraged to send information on campus race-related incidents to: JBHE 200 West 57th Street, 15th ...
Notable Minority-Related Grants to Institutions of Higher Education
Apr 01, 2005; ... * Alabama A&M University, the historically black institution in Normal, Alabama, was awarded a fiveyear, $4.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant will be used to establish the Center for Forest Ecosystems Assessment on the A&M campus. The center is under the ...
Now Comes the Campus Bake Sale: A New Staple for Student Conservatives Opposed to Affirmative Action
Apr 01, 2005; ... Conservative political groups are becoming more active on American campuses. JBHE researchers have found over 20 instances in the past year of conservative students who have staged "affirmative action bake sales." In these campus stunts, the anti-affirmative action argument is mischievously ...
Charles Spurgeon Johnson 1893-1956
Apr 30, 2005