— Highlights Include an Appearance by Katrina Adams, Chairman of the Board, CEO, and President of the United States Tennis Association —
QUEENS, NY, January 22, 2018 − An appearance by Katrina Adams, Chairman of the Board, CEO, and President of the United States Tennis Association, will be among a wide-ranging series of events announced today by President Felix V. Matos Rodriguez as Queens College celebrates Black History Month 2018. Adams is the first African-American, first former professional tennis player, and youngest person to serve as president in the organization’s 135-year history.
The theme for the month-long celebration is Sankofa: Reclaiming Our Time. A word from the Akan people of Ghana, Sankofa means “We must go back and reclaim our past in order to move forward.” This is reflected in many of the planned events.
“Waging Peace: 100 Years of Action” is the leadoff event on Thursday, February 1 and includes a reception. Other events include a presentation by culinary historian, cookbook author, journalist and Queens College faculty member Jessica Harris titled “My Soul Looks Back: Reflections on My 50-Year Career at Queens College.” Author Vanessa K. Valdés will make a presentation based upon her book Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, about the black, Puerto Rican-born scholar, collector, and archivist whose personal library was the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. Among other presentations/panel discussions will be “The Origins of Black History Month” and “What is Blackness?: A Disclosure of Identity, Ethnicity and Race.” The final event on February 28 will be a panel discussion on “Black Women and the Vote: From Suffrage to the Age of Trump.”
An event schedule can be found at www.qc.cuny.edu/BHM. All events are free and open to the public.
Queens College has long played a role in the struggle of African Americans for equal rights. In May 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King was the first speaker in the college’s John F. Kennedy Memorial Lecture Series, highlighting the power of peaceful resistance in his remarks. “Nonviolence,” Dr. King said, “is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and human dignity.” A year earlier, Queens College student Andrew Goodman was murdered along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner during the Freedom Summer voter-registration project in Mississippi. The college’s Rosenthal Library clock tower is named for the three civil rights workers. In past years the college has honored civil rights pioneers such as Aaron Henry, who received the Queens College Medal in 1990, and John Lewis, who received an honorary degree in 2009.
Many prominent African Americans have graduated from Queens College, including Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, New York Assemblywoman Barbara Clark, New York Urban League Chairman Noel Hankin, former Vice Chairman of the CUNY Board of Trustees Philip A. Berry, and Olympic medalist Gail Marquis.
About Queens College
Queens College enjoys a national reputation for its liberal arts and sciences and pre-professional programs. With its graduate and undergraduate degrees, honors programs, and research and internship opportunities, Queens College helps its over 19,000 students realize their potential in countless ways, under the guidance of an accessible, award-winning faculty. The college was recently ranked tenth among U.S. public colleges by the Chronicle of Higher Education for upward social and economic mobility. The Center for World University Rankings placed Queens College in the top 3.5% of schools worldwide, based on the quality of its education and faculty, the number of its alumni who find employment, and other factors. Located on a beautiful, 80-acre campus in Flushing, the college is cited each year by the Princeton Review as one of the nation’s 100 “Best Value” colleges, and is routinely ranked a U.S. News & World Report Best College and Forbes Magazine Best Value College, thanks to its outstanding academics, generous financial aid packages, and relatively low costs. Visit our homepage to learn more.
A leader in preparing future educators, Queens College graduates the most teachers, counselors, and principals in the New York metropolitan area. It also contributes to New York City’s talent pool as a powerful economic engine and a leader in tech education, with more undergraduate computer science majors than any city college. Students from across the country and around the world come to Queens College’s Aaron Copland School of Music. Its renowned faculty and alumni include nationally recognized composers, conductors, and performers who have received over 40 Grammy Awards and nominations over the past 40 years.
For more about Queens college, visit http://www.qc.cuny.edu/Pages/home.aspx
Contact:
Maria Matteo
Office of Communications
Assistant Director, News Services
718-997-5593
maria.matteo@qc.cuny.edu