NEW YORK – United Negro College Fund president Dr. Michael Lomax, along with high-level Black academics and others gathered in New York Monday to celebrate a program that helps young Black graduates straddle two and more worlds.
Lomax and the others were among about 150 people who recognized the second-ever group of young people to graduate from the Columbia HBCU Fellowship, a program that brings in 20 undergraduate seniors from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, awards them graduate degrees and teaches them how to navigate in corporate and working culture. The program allows the young people to take classes on the Ivy League campus, work with organizations in New York, where Columbia is located, and receive industry mentoring.
Lomax told the group that the Columbia HBCU Fellowship is valuable because HBCU students already arrive on campus academically on par and with a healthy sense of self, but also learn from the program how to move in circles where others might shun them or not immediately recognize their value. Lomax shared his own experience of arriving on the Columbia campus in 1968 with an undergraduate degree from Morehouse and plans to earn masters and doctoral degrees in English literature at Columbia. But his time there, which included difficulty finding housing, ended prematurely when he opted not to return after serving in Vietnam.
“When I got to Columbia, nobody knew about Morehouse or seemed to care,” he said, even though he’d been number two in his class at the HBCU in Atlanta.
He worried about being good enough until he saw his grades were as good or better than classmates who’d come from the Ivies, he said.
“My experience at Columbia was a rich one academically, but honestly, it was an isolating one socially, so much so that I did not return, but instead pursued my Ph.D. after the war ended at Emory University,” Lomax said, adding that the Columbia HBCU program fills a necessary gap.
“It is the kind of program that, had it existed 50 years ago, might have influenced the university … to embrace, to nurture and to welcome Black students,” he said.
