Dr. Fred Hord, the association’s founder and executive director, recalled the keynote speakers at the inaugural conference were poets Haki Madhubuti and Mari Evans and Dr. Asa Hilliard, the late Afrocentric scholar. Charter members were Knox College and Ohio State, Purdue, Kent State and West Virginia universities.
Madhubuti, now retired from academia, was back as a keynote speaker. The 115 people who registered came from about two dozen institutions, according to the John D. O’Bryant African-American Institute at Northeastern.
Other keynote speakers included Dr. Khalil Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York; Lani Guinier, a Harvard Law School professor; and Dr. J. Keith Motley, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Boston.
When Northeastern hosted the third conference in 1993, Motley was director of the African-American Institute there. Dr. Richard L. O’Bryant currently directs the institute, renamed for his father, who was a Northeastern vice president.
Hord said ABCC has come to be seen as being for universities and wants to attract more liberal arts and community colleges to its membership. It is also reaching out to HBCUs.
But the association, Hord said, has had difficulty drawing institutional members from prestigious schools even though one of this year’s keynote speakers, Guinier, is at Harvard, and another is at the University of Chicago, Dr. Cathy Cohen, chair of its political science department.
