Greetings from the Coordinator:
As the Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) community begins yet another academic year, the African American Studies Program is poised to become a significant aspect of the student experience in a host of ways. Birthed in 1968 in the midst of a national push to include the Black experience on diversifying collegiate campuses, the multi-disciplinary African American Studies Program at PVAMU seeks to honor those initial aspirations via programming that positively impacts the student experience as well as engagement opportunities with the surrounding community via programming that includes community forums, panel discussions, films, and interactive lectures focused on the past experiences, present plight, and future opportunities of African Americans.
At its best, African American Studies serves as an active agent reaching milestones and markers of Black success such as closing achievement and quality of life gaps that have proven to be elusive since the forcible depositing of Africans into the Jamestown Colony in 1619. The alluded areas of improvement include, but not limited to, economic inequality, disparate political power among American citizens, gaps in access to education and health care. PVAMU joins an elite class of Historically Black Colleges and Universities in picking up the mantle of supplementing existing curriculum offerings by injecting the contributions and achievements of persons of African descent while producing a new generation of activists and leaders.
Program Goals
- Exposing students to the experiences of persons of African descent since the beginning of recorded history.
- Teaching students a relevant historical timeline that contextualizes the Black experience from “the discovery of the New World” through the new millennium.
- Examining the historical, political, and social experiences of New World Africans and their descendants since their arrival in the Jamestown Colony.
- Preparing students to bring significant purpose to their studies by developing critical thinking skills as well as communication (written and oral) skills to uplift the nation.
- Preparing students for future professional opportunities in fields as diverse as Engineering, Architecture, History, Political Science, Literature, Sociology, Education, Nursing, and other professional paths.
My introduction to African American Studies began at The Ohio State University where I earned a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in Black Studies, those degrees were buttressed by an additional Master of Arts degree and Doctor of Philosophy in History where I focused my studies on African American Manhood, Black Power, American Radicalism, Black Intellectual Thought, Women’s Studies, and Black Popular Culture.
Within a shifting nation that has frequently left the population that DuBois termed “the darker brother/sister” behind, African American Studies serves as one of America’s last beacons of hope as it possesses the ability to simultaneously endow African American collegians and their non-Black counterparts with pertinent information capable of identifying new millennium dilemmas emanating from a centuries-old American past. Toward making PVAMUs African American Studies program a success, it is crucial that students consider it an attractive option in one of the following ways.
- Majoring in African American Studies
- Minoring in African American Studies
- Taking classes as electives to bolster one’s understanding of the African American experience and bolster one’s attractiveness to graduate schools and the professional arena.
Those students seeking inclusion in an engaging academic discipline that addresses many of the issues facing Black America, African American Studies should receive thoughtful consideration as it holds the potential to increase one’s understanding of various aspects of American society in an unexpected way. If you are interested in majoring, minoring, or simply taking a few classes focused on the Black experience, please do not hesitate to engage us as we continue the nearly fifty-year tradition of asserting the undeniable past, present, and future contributions of Black America.
Professionally,
James Thomas Jones III, Ph.D., M.A., M.A.
