NEW YORK–
In a remote corner of the campus of Columbia University, in a wing of a building overlooking Amsterdam Avenue, is a place where most might not suspect all the Black history magic happens.
But once you enter the Schermerhorn Extension, there’s no mistaking you are in some place special as headshots of writer/researcher Zora Neale Hurston and scholar Franz Boas, graduate anthropology student and anthropology educator, greet you from behind a glass case.
This building is home to Columbia’s new African-American and African Diaspora Studies Department, formally created in December, as well as Columbia’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies.
The department will now be the formal umbrella for courses and educators who have operated throughout disciplines and throughout the school. The institute will continue to operate as a connection to the public and to public issues, much like The Hutchins Center for African & African-American Research at Harvard University headed by Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Dr. Farah Griffin, who is wearing two hats as the inaugural chair of the new department and director-elect of the institute, has hit the ground running. She has plans to create an endowed chair named for the late Dr. Manning Marable, the historian who founded the institute. She also is working on a conference slated for April focused on the 400th anniversary of the first Africans who came to the United States, in Jamestown, Va.
She says it’s an important time in history for Columbia to assert itself when it comes to issues of diversity, a time in which the U.S. President is insisting on the construction of a wall to keep out migrants from Mexico; when photos are surfacing of public figures wearing Blackface and Black people dying in incidents with police.
