This author's reading selection for his class provoked an unexpected response: when one of the main characters in the reading "came out of the closet," the students divided themselves into those who were willing to discuss the issues, and those who weren't.

Much of what has been written about local, state, and national approaches related to the desegregation of public schools focuses on administrative concerns, policy debates, and other issues faced by schools, yet there are still many stories of initiatives designed to facilitate school integration in the twentieth century to be told. The lives, the…

In 1983, when the author began graduate school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville as the only black student in the Graduate English School, it offered no graduate-level African-American Literature course. Today an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia can major in African-American and African Studies and take courses…

Few regions in the U.S. boast a more plentiful array of historically significant sites than the 175-mile-long route between Monticello, Virginia, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. From the most venerated of Civil War battlefields to nine historic homes of U.S. presidents and thousands of sites listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the…

Malaika Favorite's "Furious Flower Poetry Quilt" (2004) is an acrylic painting that depicts 24 portraits of leading poets of the African Diaspora. Commissioned by Dr Joanne Gabbin, English professor and director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, the painting is part of a larger programme of poetry…

Hampton Institute has developed an educational technique in several lines which is of interest especially to those institutions that are still trying to find their way under difficulties and that for lack of vision as well as lack of support are unable to reach the high ideals of training which have resulted from the careful working out of the…