Despite a court order, achieving racial parity still appears a long way off
When George Munchus came to the University of Alabama at Birmingham
in 1976, he was the only Black professor in the business department,
and one of just a few at the university.
“Given the history of White supremacy in the state of Alabama, most
people had little to no exposure to Black scholars,” he says.
For 20 years, despite his appeals to the institution’s senior
administrators, he says he remained the lone African American professor
there.
In 1996, the university hired another African American professor in
the business department. And two years later that department still has
just two Black professors.
Institution-wide the picture doesn’t get any prettier. In a city
nearly three-quarters Black, 4 percent of the university’s full-time
faculty members are African American. Black administrators are at just
9 percent.
UAB has the largest Black faculty of the traditionally White
institutions in the state. Looking at the totals for all the TWIs in
Alabama, as of last fall, Blacks constituted 4.2 percent of nearly
6,000 full-time faculty members. That same year, Blacks constituted
merely 6.4 percent of all administrators at the state’s colleges and
universities.
