Elizabeth City State University, the historically Black educational institution in North Carolina, recently opened its new Kermit E. White Graduate and Continuing Education Center. The center houses the university’s art gallery.
One section of the gallery will display pieces from the university’s permanent collection of African and African American art. The other part of the gallery will exhibit a rotating selection or a visiting collection.
Professor Alexis Joyner, chair of the art department at the university, loaned eight pieces from his personal collection for the opening exhibit. In addition, works by Leonard Jones, a former professor at Virginia State University and Charles Joyner of North Carolina State University are in the opening exhibit.
The accompanying illustration shows one of the pieces in the exhibit, “Guitar Player” by Leonard Jones.
article via jbhe.com
Posts published in March 2013
On Friday, Gen. Lloyd Austin became the first African-American leader of the U.S. Central Command, which has a wide-ranging area of responsibility for 20 countries in the Middle East and southwest Asia. It’s not the first time in his 37-year career that he’s broken barriers for black members of the Army. He was also the first African American to serve in his previous position as the vice chief of staff.
Read more at: General Lloyd Austin: Meet the Black Man Who Keeps Breaking Army Barriers.
Students at West Point attending a reading by Toni Morrison on Friday. She read from her novel “Home,” which focuses on a Korean War veteran. (Kirsten Luce for The New York Times)
WEST POINT, N.Y. — As thousands of hungry West Point cadets streamed into the mess hall for their 20-minute lunch break here on Friday, they paused from the rush to the tables to give a rousing group cheer to a guest who has received hundreds of accolades, but perhaps none this thunderous.
“I can’t believe this — it’s like a movie,” said Toni Morrison, who sat at one of the 420 wooden tables in the flag-bedecked Washington Hall, a majestic Romanesque structure at the United States Military Academy.
Seated with members of the African-American Arts Forum at West Point, Ms. Morrison ate her Army-issue ravioli and prepared to read from her most recent novel, “Home,” to the freshman cadets, who studied the book in English class this semester.
The novel is the story of Frank Money, a black Georgia native and Korean War veteran struggling to reintegrate into civilian life in a segregated America, while struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Harriet Tubman pictured with a group of formerly enslaved African-Americans, in an undated photo.
On Monday, President Barack Obama will designate five new National Monuments, including one for abolitionist Harriet Tubman. The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, located on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, will receive a designation as a National Park, along with Delaware’s First State National Monument, Ohio’s Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument, the Río Grande del Norte National Monument in New Mexico, and the San Juan Islands National Monument in Washington State. The designations are made by under the Antiquities Act, and the new monuments will be administered by the Department of the Interior.
The Antiquities Act, which was first used by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, allows presidents to preserve public lands and historic places in the U.S., such as the Statue of Liberty and the Grand Canyon.
A statement from a White House official read:
“The monument commemorates the life of the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad who was responsible for helping enslaved people escape from bondage to freedom. The new national park, located on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, includes large sections of landscapes that are significant to Tubman’s early life in Dorchester County and evocative of her life as a slave and conductor of the Underground Railroad. The park includes Stewart’s Canal, dug by hand by free and enslaved people between 1810 and the 1830s and where Tubman learned important outdoor skills when she worked in the nearby timbering operations with her father. Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge and Refuge lands, although park of the new national park, will continue to be managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument also includes the home site of Jacob Jackson, a free black man who used coded letters to help Tubman communicate with family and others. The monument will also partner with the State of Maryland’s Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park Visitor Center when it opens in 2015.”
article via thegrio.com
Chinua Achebe in 2008 at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., where he was a professor at the time.(Craig Ruttle/Associated Press)
LAGOS (Reuters) – Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, widely seen as the grandfather of modern African literature, has died at the age of 82. From the publication of his first novel, “Things Fall Apart”, over 50 years ago, Achebe shaped an understanding of Africa from an African perspective more than any other author. As a novelist, poet, broadcaster and lecturer, Achebe was a yardstick against which generations of African writers have been judged. For children across Africa, his books have for decades been an eye-opening introduction to the power of literature.
Describing Achebe as a “colossus of African writing”, South African President Jacob Zuma expressed sadness at his death. Nelson Mandela, who read Achebe’s work in jail, has called him a writer “in whose company the prison walls fell down.”
Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”, published in 1958, told of his Igbo ethnic group’s fatal brush with British colonizers in the 1800s – the first time the story of European colonialism had been told from an African viewpoint to an international audience. The book was translated into 50 languages and has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.
Denver Broncos’ Von Miller talks to the press after receiving the AP Defensive Rookie of the Year at the 2012 NFL Honors at the Murat Theatre on February 4, 2012 in Indianapolis, Indiana. (Photo by Joey Foley/Getty Images)
He sat down with theGrio at the unveiling of AXE’s Face range and Shave line to discuss how having good vision contributed to his career success and what he’s learned about leadership from teammate and Denver Quarterback Peyton Manning.
What about good vision made you want to pursue it as a charitable effort?
I feel like society puts emphasis on maintaining your senses, eating the right foods, and personal hygiene, yet I feel not enough is not dedicated to your eyes. While you’re able to get your teeth fixed or replaced when they’re not cleaned properly, you only have one pair of eyes you know?
If you start off having a bad foundation in relation to your eyes at an early age, you’re starting off on the wrong foot as a kid. You’d be amazed to know how many kids need glasses, but aren’t aware that they have eye problems. I’m here with my foundation to solve that.
Jennifer Hudson and Octavia Spencer (“The Help”) have been tapped to star in the soon to premiere Lifetime movie event “Call Me Crazy: A Five Film.” Following the success of the first “Five’ feature (Alicia Keys), “Call Me Crazy” brings together an all-star ensemble cast with five interwoven stories about how everlasting bonds of love and family can overcome life’s most challenging hurdles.
Jennifer Hudson will star in the short “Maggie,” which focuses on a female veteran (Hudson) that returns home from war to her son and father (Ernie Hudson), only to have her life shattered by the onset of posttraumatic stress disorder, through which her lawyer, “Lucy,” helps her.
“Through the five shorts named after each title character — Lucy, Eddie, Allison, Grace and Maggie – powerful relationships built on hope and triumph raise a new understanding of what happens when a loved one struggles with mental illness,” reports Lifetime.
NBC Southern California – The gutting of Men’s Central Jail cells to be replaced with inmate classrooms is one element of a dramatic re-envisioning of the Los Angeles County jail system as proposed by Sheriff Lee Baca.
During his tenure, Baca has expanded educational opportunities for county inmates. Gutting the old central jail to make room for inmate classrooms would take the program to a new level.
Inmates who obtain their high school graduate equivalent degrees (GEDs) are more likely to find work when released into society, and less likely to re-offend, Baca is convinced.
The response to the county’s inmate educational program is “like nothing I’ve seen in my 47 years in law enforcement,” Baca told reporters Tuesday outside the County Hall of Administration. “It’s a good idea,” said one man following his release from Men’s Central Jail after serving a week for a drug violation. “Not everyone, but a lot of the men want to change.”
“Education can help,” said the former inmate, who declined to give his name. Other aspects of his plan include building a new central jail, repurposing Lancaster’s Mira Loma detention center, and transferring women inmates out of the Century Regional Detention Facility, either to Mira Loma or to the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic.
AC Milan midfielder Kevin Prince Boateng, of Ghana, celebrates at the end of the Champions League round of 16, first leg soccer match against Barcelona, at the San Siro stadium in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2013. AC Milan won 2-0. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
GENEVA (AP) — The ugly side of the beautiful game was exposed Thursday as the U.N.’s top human rights official joined football officials and players in calling for an end to the “crime” of racism in sport. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said the world is a long way from achieving that as evidence by a series of incidents including racist insults and chants, Nazi salutes, petitions against players and denial of hiring that are based on color or ethnicity and have no place in football or any other game.
“Sport, at its best, is inclusive, generous-hearted, and fundamentally multicultural, based on values such as teamwork, loyalty, merit and self-control,” Pillay told a crowded forum at the U.N.’s European headquarters in Geneva, where she was flanked by AC Milan player Kevin-Prince Boateng, former France captain Patrick Viera and several FIFA and European football officials.
Several officials said they were taking real action, not just paying lip service to the problem, through actions such a FIFA anti-racism task force.
“Sport, at its best, is inclusive, generous-hearted, and fundamentally multicultural, based on values such as teamwork, loyalty, merit and self-control,” Pillay told a crowded forum at the U.N.’s European headquarters in Geneva, where she was flanked by AC Milan player Kevin-Prince Boateng, former France captain Patrick Viera and several FIFA and European football officials.
Several officials said they were taking real action, not just paying lip service to the problem, through actions such a FIFA anti-racism task force.
Pamela Gunter-Smith has been selected to become the fourth president of York College in York, Pennsylvania. She will begin her new role on July 1. York College enrolls about 5,800 students in undergraduate and graduate programs. African Americans make up about 4 percent of the undergraduate student body.
Since 2006, Dr. Gunter-Smith has been provost and academic vice president at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Previously, she was the Porter Professor of Physiology at Spelman College in Atlanta. At Spelman, she chaired the biology department for 10 years and was the program director of the Center for Biomedical and Behavioral Research.
Dr. Gunter-Smith is a graduate of Spelman College. She earned a Ph.D. in physiology at Emory University in Atlanta and did postdoctoral research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.
article via Spelman College Graduate to Become President of York College in Pennsylvania : The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.