A Message to You From the Interim Director of Black Studies
Black Studies is celebrating 40 years of existence. This is an academic discipline that was created by students at institutions such as Cornell, San Francisco State University, Stanford, Columbia, the Ohio State University, and more. Resorting to protests and sit-ins and strikes when petitions failed, these students demanded instruction in the contribution of African Americans to the United States. They soon learned that students of other ethnic groups wanted to learn about their own heritage in addition to the Black Experience. In other words, the Black Studies movement has been multi-cultural and multi-racial from the very beginning.
Otterbein College is situated in an area long involved with the abolition movement. We were among the first institutions in the United States to admit African Americans, doing so before the Civil War. There is an Underground Railroad Station in the Hanby House near Towers Hall and the Courtright Memorial Library. Not far away, on Africa Road, there was a community of freed slaves who created a life of freedom, one of many such communities in Ohio. Many Otterbein students fought in the Civil War. Black Studies is a continuation of an Otterbein College's commitment to social justice.
The Black Studies Minor Program is open to all students interested in social justice, global citizenship and social healing. You will become part of a movement that promotes community health, community wealth, community empowerment and community expression.
For example, on September 22, 2007, fifty thousand people, mostly Black but including people from other ethnic groups, marched in Jena, Louisiana against unequal, racially biased sentencing practices in the United States. Otterbein students committed traveling to Jena, Louisiana and to staging a simultaneous local protest. Black Studies was part of a campus-wide effort to support this student effort.
In other words, there is a movement to make America deliver the blessings of liberty to all citizens.
As an historian of the African diaspora, I believe that we must recommit in greater numbers to the Pan-African mission of nineteenth and twentieth-century global warriors like Sojourner Truth, George Washington Williams, Lott Carey, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. and Margaret Washington, Marcus and Amy Garvey, and W. E. B. Du Bois. It is time to raise a new generation of guardians of democracy like these heroes of the past.
Are you a hero in the making?
The Black Studies Minor Program is here to help you become a hero in the career of your choosing. We do so by offering a Black Studies model developed by internally known psychologist Dr. Linda James Myers whose optimal thinking, a holistic and healing ontology, orients students to identify and repair social fractures, a healing process similar to bark growing over a hatchet gash in a baobab tree trunk.
An education in this holistic approach to an Africa-centered perspective leads to a desire for social justice, something that people of all ethnic groups can understand.
Join us! There is room for you to grow as a person and a global citizen in the Black Studies Minor Program at Otterbein College.
 Assistant Professor of History Interim Director of the Black Studies Minor Program Member, National Council for Black Studies |
