Attending a race conference held at Princeton University was a pivotal moment for Dr. Andrew Rosa, as he discovered his true passion for teaching and interest in African-American studies.
Rosa attended the conference in 1994 during his final year as an undergraduate student at Hampshire College, where he was an English and history double major with an emphasis on the African-American experience.
Upon graduating from Hampshire, Rosa attended Temple University where he earned his master’s degree and then returned to New England where he was part of the second class to complete a newly formed Ph.D. program, at the time, in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
“As a grad student, I got to see and experience a wide spectrum of folk who were working in the field in African-American studies,” says Rosa, who is now an associate professor of History and African American Studies at Western Kentucky University (WKU). “From Afrocentric perspective to the more sort of radical left, nationalist and pan-Africanist perspective.”
After graduate school, Rosa became a faculty member at Oklahoma State University (OSU). He taught African-American history on the main campus in Stillwater as well as on the regional campus in Tulsa, which is about 100 miles away.
“My time was really spread thin traveling the highway to and from those two campuses,” says Rosa. “As the only African Americanist, it was a very time consuming but rewarding experience. I learned so much about the African-American experience in the lower mid-West that I would never have done, had I not spent my first years out of graduate school in that part of the country and that university.”
During his time at OSU, Rosa focused mostly on the events of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot by organizing a film series and book readings. He also was part of an effort to create a memorial in Tulsa to commemorate the riots. The memorial was opened in 2011 on the site of the historic Greenwood district, where the riots took place.
