morehouse

MOREHOUSE COLLEGE
www.morehouse.edu

Background
Proposed Activities to be Funded as Part of the Cluster
Expected Student Learning and Institutional Outcomes
Ability to Provide Leadership for Additional Civic Learning Clusters
Leadership Team

Background

The unique intentional culture of Morehouse which stresses ethical character building and civic involvement in racial justice causes is rooted in the leadership of John Hope, who became the first Black President of the institution in 1906. From the beginning of his presidency, Hope was determined to create a liberal arts institution dedicate to producing thinking Black men in the midst of the atrocities of a Jim Crow society. His close friendship with William E. B. DuBois was not coincidental since both felt that the purpose of social science was to use it as an advocacy tool on the behalf of racial justice. In 1919, it was Hope along with several southern white liberals who established the Commission on Interracial Cooperation which would help to lay the groundwork for the 1950s/1960s civil rights movement.

Proposed Activities to be Funded as Part of the Cluster

Morehouse College has proposed to design and implement a Twenty First Century Racial Justice Program as the focus of its new initiatives for participation in the Civic Learning Cluster Project. Although many forms of traditional racial injustice are no longer part of state sanctioned policies and procedures, the mindsets which led to discriminatory attitudes and practices certainly have not been eliminated. The persisting issues of racial discrimination in our society are exacerbated by the changing demographics in the United States and worldwide which are expected to result in colorizing the world's population. By the midpoint of the twenty-first century, the demographic composition of leadership as representational of the population at large will be significantly more racially and ethnically diverse in American business, academia, electoral politics, media, religion, and health care.

The question Morehouse College plans to address through its proposed Racial Justice Program is how do we get from being a society changing on one level demographically but still embedded in deeply ingrained norms of racial injustice to a future pluralistic society which is more in step with the democratic claims of the nation-state. The College's answer to this question is the creation of intentional institutional spaces in America to identify, cultivate, sponsor, and place future generations of leaders who will carry the seeds of racial justice and inter-cultural tolerance with them as they move up the ladders of education, work, family, and civic life and sow them where ever they go. These leaders must be people who have a broad understanding of the practical social sciences and history of racial injustice as it has wrapped its ugly arms around numerous dominant and subordinate populations. In this sense, they must be multiracial in awareness and in boundary-crossing life style. These leaders must have global consciousness in a society which is transnational. And they must have extraordinary emotional intelligence (which may or not correlate with high standardized test scores and grade point averages) manifested in impeccable public and personal ethics and character. These leaders must understand that change is best done effectively through strategic planning processes. But, before societal transformation occurs, personal transformation must happen as the impetus behind individuals joining others with like values, interests, and visions to plan out a new kind of society.

With this framing vision for its participation in the Civic Learning Cluster Project, Morehouse College is proposing a new initiative dedicated to the education of transformative Black male leaders for twenty-first century America and the world. This program, to be called Twenty First Century Racial Justice, will capitalize on the extraordinary institutional history of the College to transform the campus into a brain-trust for mentoring and preparing as future leaders undergraduate Black males who will have the capacity to create new pathways to racial justice in the United States and on international levels.

The purpose of this program is to bring students, faculty, and administrators of Morehouse to reflectively explore the contributions of Hope, Mays, King, and Thurman as Morehouse icons who contributed so greatly to the dismantling of Jim Crow America and racial injustices around the globe. Secondly, the conditions of today and the near future must be investigated with a view to transforming the traditional strategic planning tactics of the civil rights era and developing new tactics to advance racial justice causes.

The proposed Racial Justice Program which is co-sponsored by the Morehouse Leadership Center and the Department of Sociology will involve two components: faculty advisement and strategic campus leadership formation. The basic goals of these components are (a) to identify, cultivate and strategically place a select number of freshmen who will be involved in a four year experience of intense reading, writing, discussion and interning in the area of twenty-first century racial justice and (b) to identify, organize, and support a system of influential faculty advisers, administrators, and professional staff who over time come to reach a consensus on the best ways to transform the campus culture to institutionalize the Program as a Morehouse brain trust on twenty-first century racial justice strategic planning. The proposed initiative will enable the College to utilize the expertise of the Morehouse Leadership Center to select the first cohort of freshmen who will be involved in this strategic campus leadership formation.

Five faculty members from various fields in the sciences, social sciences and humanities have been selected to serve as advisors to students participating in this program beginning in their freshman year. Throughout the students' four years at Morehouse, faculty advisors will meet with their mentees as a group at least once a semester and individually at least twice a semester. The faculty advisers will join their mentees and five administrators in bimonthly dialogues focused on readings assigned by the Director of the program. Each peer group will meet at least once a semester with faculty advisors, students and administrators to share perceptions of the Program and its outcomes with the Program Director.

Role-modeling represents a significant component of the proposed program. Distinguished civil rights activists, civil rights scholars, and other prominent Americans identified as leaders committed to racial justices in the fields of business, education, electoral politics, law, medicine, science, technology and religion will be invited to the Morehouse Leadership Center as Morehouse Leadership Fellows. The Leadership Fellows will be involved in a range of activities and dialogues with students and faculty. One Leadership Fellow will be selected each semester.

Under the guidance of the Director, students in the Racial Justice Program will be involved in a series of specified structured academic and community activities during each year of the program. During the spring semester of their sophomore year, for example, students will intern in an off-campus site such as the Center for Disease Control, the Carter Center, or the Office of the Chief Justice of the Georgia State Supreme Court. Central to the internship will be a seminar in which students and the Director of the Program meet to discuss their experiences and findings.
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Expected Student Learning and Institutional Outcomes

Morehouse College anticipates that participation by students, faculty and administrators in the proposed innovative and concentrated program on Racial Justice will result in changing students perceptions about racial injustice, will influence their career choices, and will result in graduates prepared to take the initiative to define their own pathways. It is expected that the faculty and administrators participating in developing this model program will develop insights into ways to redesign the College's Core Curriculum and other areas of academic life to include leadership development throughout the College's structure.
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Ability to Provide Leadership for Additional Civic Learning Clusters

The College anticipates that the Twenty First Century Racial Justice Program will provide important insights for other institutions grappling with one of the most daunting problems in American life.

Leadership Team

Project Director:
John Stanfield, AVALON Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology

Abraham Davis, Professor of Political Science
J. K. Haynes, Science Division Director and Chair of Biology
Walter Fluker, Director, Morehouse Leadership Center
Laron Clark, Institutional Advancement
Nathaniel White
Duande J. Newman, Morehouse College Sophomore
Robert Eskridge, III, Morehouse College Junior
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