Tag: African American

  • Nation & World

    Panel of experts addresses Lincoln’s legacy

    On Monday (Feb. 9), a team of experts assembled at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (HKS) to examine the history and profound impact of the tall, awkward, self-taught man from rural Kentucky who is credited with bringing about an end to slavery and saving the nation’s cherished founding principle of democratic rule.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Du Bois Institute gives Houghton Library Masonic certificate

    The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University recently gave a Masonic membership certificate signed by Prince Hall, a minister, abolitionist, and civil rights activist known as the father of Black Freemasonry in the United States, to Houghton Library.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    At GSD, UPenn’s Thomas Sugrue talks about ‘civil rights and the metropolis’

    For the first time in a generation, urban policy is back on the national agenda. Advocates for the nation’s cities have been thrilled by the announcement that the Obama administration will include a White House Office of Urban Policy.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Achebe celebrates African literature with poetry

    Chinua Achebe, the esteemed Nigerian novelist and poet, delivered this year’s Distinguished African Studies Lecture at the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS). Greeting the standing-room-only crowd in Tsai Auditorium earlier this week (Nov. 17), Achebe surprised the group by announcing that he had an unusual program in mind.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Marla Frederick talks about faith, God, and money

    Not long ago, Harvard cultural anthropologist Marla Frederick sat on a wooden bench in a slum of Kingston, Jamaica. She was interviewing local churchgoers about the Christian “prosperity gospel” often promoted by American televangelists. It offers up a simple (and controversial) idea: The more you give, the more you receive.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Looking at race, racism through a philosophical lens

    Tommie Shelby’s airy office in the Barker Center is piled with papers. His desk is a blanket of white. Books and academic journals litter the floor. The look is, in a word, chaotic. The scholar is anything but.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Cooper: Doctor-patient relations cause health disparities

    In the United States, a black man can expect to die, on average, 10 years earlier than his white counterpart. For black women, that racial gap in life expectancy is five years.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Davis explains how he makes his operas swing

    A former Harvard professor returned to campus last week to explain how he makes opera swing. Anthony Davis, a composer known for his diverse approach to music, incorporating diverse elements like jazz, improvisation, minimalism, and the Javanese gamelan (an Indonesian musical ensemble that includes gongs, xylophones, and bamboo flutes) into his work, recently discussed his…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Radcliffe Fellow, poet Elizabeth Alexander reads

    It was show and tell for poet Elizabeth Alexander this week. The Yale University professor of African American studies, a Radcliffe Fellow this year, used a May 5 reading to show the depth and musicality of her poems, short stories, and penetrating essays — and to tell the story of inspiration’s multiple avenues.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘Baby College’ and beyond

    Geoffrey Canada — author, educator, psychologist, motivator, poet, black belt, sometime comedian, and founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone — spoke to an enthusiastic crowd of about 300 in the packed Ames Courtroom in Austin Hall last week (March 12).

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    African American National Biography launched

    From Aaron, a former slave without a last name, through Paul Burgess Zuber, a 20th century lawyer and professor, the recently published African American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2008) is the most extensive and inclusive collection of biographical information about African American lives ever published. The African American National Biography (AANB), co-edited by Henry…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Black Students Association honors pair for activism, service

    The Harvard Black Students Association honored Robert Lewis Jr., vice president for program at the Boston Foundation, and critically acclaimed actress Gabrielle Union with its Crimson and Black Leadership awards on Feb. 29. Crimson and Black is an annual event at the University designed to showcase the achievements of Harvard’s past black students while addressing…

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The first civil rights movement

    Most of us think of the Civil Rights movement as something that took place in the transitional 1950s and the tumultuous 1960s. It’s seen as a cultural artifact squeezed between the defiance of Rosa Parks (1955) and the demise of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968).

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Exploring tangled legacy of slavery

    Certain adages exist about historical repetition: those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it, for example, or history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. Walter Johnson doesn’t necessary believe in these old chestnuts, but he does see how the past and the present can illuminate one another in order to provide…

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Chute on graphic narratives — they’re not just comic books anymore

    The title of Hillary Chute’s Nov. 29 lecture, “Out of the Gutter: Contemporary Graphic Novels by Women,” has a double meaning. It refers to the elevation of graphic narratives — comics — from the lowest, most disreputable level of artistic expression to a form worthy of New York Times best-sellerdom, literary prizes, and academic attention.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Bearden Foundation honors Henry Louis Gates Jr. , Derek Walcott

    This past September, the Romare Bearden Foundation honored Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. along with Nobel laureate Derek Walcott for their contributions and commitment to the literary and artistic canon.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Newsmakers

    Renowned Egyptian activist Nawal El Saadawi has been selected by the Harvard Committee on African Studies to deliver its annual Distinguished Harvard African Studies Lecture. Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics Eric Mazur and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 300th Anniversary University Professor, were recently named Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) Visiting Scholars for the 2007-08 academic…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    The ‘social power’ of marriage

    By all accounts, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a funny man with a wide-ranging, brilliant, synthesizing mind. At the same time, many of his friends say, he had a gift for dramatic language that sometimes overshadowed his true intentions.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Four decades later, scholars re-examine ‘Moynihan Report’

    Before he was a United States senator from New York, before he was ambassador to India, before he taught government at Harvard, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) served as assistant secretary of labor under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and it was in that capacity that he issued a report in March 1965 titled “The Negro Family:…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Former staff, prestigious artist Crite dies at 97

    Allan Rohan Crite, a renowned painter and Harvard Extension School alumnus, passed away on Sept. 6. He was 97.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Bercovitch wins Bode-Pearson Prize

    Sacvan Bercovitch, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus, has won the Bode-Pearson Prize for outstanding contributions to American studies.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Bobo, Morgan return to Harvard

    Marcyliena Morgan, a noted linguistic anthropologist, and Lawrence D. Bobo, a renowned sociologist, have been appointed professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Both will join the Department of African and African American Studies (AAAS); Bobo will have a joint appointment in sociology. Morgan and Bobo, who are husband and wife, were members of…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    From the borderline

    Under a big tent set for lunch in breezy Radcliffe Yard on Friday (June 8), Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison offered a gathering of 950 graduates, fellows, and friends a brief meditation on the oblique efficacy of the humanities. She said these “creative, imaginative arts” counsel, goad, and interrogate American culture from its own borders.

    4 minutes
    Toni Morrison.
  • Nation & World

    Harvard Foundation honors Ruby Dee

    Ruby Dee — civil rights activist, star of stage and screen, and the surviving half of a pair who, for much of the 20th century, reigned as the first couple of African-American theater — made it to Harvard this week.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Albert Einstein, Civil Rights activist

    Einstein’s response to the racism and segregation he found in Princeton was to cultivate relationships in the town’s African-American community. Jerome and Taylor interviewed members of that community who still remember the white-haired, disheveled figure of Einstein strolling through their streets, stopping to chat with the inhabitants, and handing out candy to local children.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    S. Allen Counter, Deval Patrick to receive leadership award

    Concerned Black Men of Massachusetts (CBMM) will recognize Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Harvard University’s S. Allen Counter with the Paul Robeson Leadership Award for their “leadership and community service” at CBMM’s 2007 Andrew J. Davis Jr. Unity Breakfast.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Notorious U.S. Supreme Court decision is revisited

    Dred Scott. You don’t have to be a lawyer or historian to have that name conjure up feelings of horror and injustice.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    BMF to honor actress Allen as Woman of the Year

    The Harvard Black Men’s Forum (BMF) will present the 2007 Woman of the Year award to acclaimed actress, producer, director, and choreographer Debbie Allen. The presentation of the 2007 award — scheduled for March 10 at the Boston Fairmount Copley Hotel — will be the highlight of the 13th annual “Celebration of Black Women: Honoring…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Jackson raps abundance of ‘experts’

    In 1973, Shirley Ann Jackson became the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Decades – and 38 honorary degrees – later, Jackson is the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. Her resume includes time as a university researcher (in theoretical elementary particle physics);…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Fishburne feted at Cultural Rhythms

    The phrase “rich ethnic and cultural diversity” seemed like an understatement at last Saturday’s (Feb. 24) Cultural Rhythms extravaganza. This year’s event was energized by the appearance of the Artist of the Year Laurence Fishburne, the mightily accomplished actor, director, producer, and humanitarian.

    1 minute