Black Academia This Week Vol. 12

As it is Friday at 8am PST, it is time for another Black Academia This Week. As always, Black Academia This Week was created to share what is happening in the Black community within academic spaces. In addition to this blog post, there is also an IGTV series that can be found on @blkgradstudent. Lastly thanks again for supporting Black Academia This Week, and I hope that you enjoy this week’s 3 topics.

1: ‘Rite of Passage’ Black High School Student Celebration

The Los Angeles Urban League, and Black College Expo are collaborating to bring together Black entertainers and community leaders to congratulate Black high school students. This will be a direct follow up to last year’s celebration of 2020 graduates, and will have more exposure by having a national television presence this year. Also, during the event they will be giving away around $100,000 in scholarships, and registering for the event gives you access to apply. To get a feel for how the event was last year watch the video above, to see who was at the event.

If you know someone who should register for the event, or if you would like to register for the event yourself, you can find the information located here: Black Graduation (thecollegeexpo.org)

2: Black law professor resigns after attaining a full professor promotion

At the University of Memphis in their Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, Alena Allen would have become the school’s first African American woman full professor. She decided to resign instead, due to the university’s inability to retain Black faculty. Allen has been at the university for eleven years, and while the law student population has become more diverse, the faculty has not. At the time of her hiring, the Black law student population was around 7.6%, and now ranges between 16% and 19% while the Black law faculty percentage has remained the same. With Allen’s resignation comes tremendous loss to the Black law community at the university, as she also served as the 2017-2018 Director of Diversity. She also was committed to providing students with opportunities such as a moment where she recommended a first generation black student receive a plane ticket for a conference in Washington. This student later went on to practice law in Memphis.

The decision to resign was not taken lightly, but it was caused by a variety of behaviors after her promotion. The first being when she received the letter of her promotion, she was address as “Ms. Allen”, while other faculty was addressed as “Professor”. This behavior was shortly followed by a faculty meeting in which the Provost questioned the difficulty of the promotion standards of the school of law. Shortly after that meeting, Allen resigned. This was not an easy decision for her, but the positive side, Allen still plans to be involved in higher education. Her drive to inspire the next generation of Black law students will continue just in a new way.

For more information about the resignation, and more data on Black law students, see the following article: Black law professor resigns due to lack of diversity (usatoday.com)

3: Black Valedictorian and Salutatorian have a moving target for their recognition

A Mississippi HS had two black female students as their valedictorian and salutatorian.

Then suddenly, hours before the graduation, they announced two additional students were ALSO the valedictorian and salutatorian for a total of four. The school has deleted their social media pic.twitter.com/CkAKQ5nKjL

— chris evans (@chris_notcapn) June 1, 2021

West Point High School in Mississippi originally announced the valedictorian and salutatorian as Ikeria Washington and Layla Temple respectively, but hours before their graduation they announced two additional students. The issue in this situation occurs because Washington and Temple, are both Black women, and the two additional students are both white. That alone is not the issue but it is also the fact that originally the school looked at QPA to determine that Washington and Temple would be recognized, and later came back stating that a school policy required the GPA for valedictorian and salutatorian recognition. Because of this, the school decided to have co-valedictorians and co-salutatorians. The timing of the decision also attributed to the overall issue, being hours before the graduation with Washington and Temple finding out from social media that they were no longer the sole winners. Since the change West Point High School has taken down their social media.

For more insight into what occurred, feel free to read the following article: Mississippi High School Dragged Over Valedictorian, Salutatorian Mixup | NewsOne

Recommended Reading

This week, during my research I found a lot of great articles that I just could not cover. For this reason, I am adding a recommended reading section. If you are looking for additional news please see the following articles:

• Reparations task force meets in CA to discuss compensation for relatives of enslaved Black Americans (msn.com)
• Scholarships awarded to Black advanced mental health students – WSOC TV
• Closing the education gap for Black Males (baynews9.com)