Since its founding 30 years ago, the Association for Black Culture Centers (ABCC) has grown from the 50 institutions represented at its inaugural conference at Knox College in 1989 and redefined its mission to include Latin(x), Asian American and Native American Culture Centers.
However, Dr. Fred Hord, ABCC’s founder and executive director, says that ABCC has had a large contingent of multiculture centers since its early days and “decided to build both on the increasing collaboration of these ethnic specific centers and the more than occasional identification of staff and students of being Black simultaneously with being Latino, Asian American or Native American.”
“Connecting these ethnic specific centers with Black Centers in this fashion would call clear historical attention to early African influences on and connections to other ethnic groups,” he adds.
Additionally, beginning last year and through 2021, a number of ABCC culture centers are celebrating milestone 30th, 40th and 50th anniversaries.
Dr. Lori Patton Davis, chair of the Department of Educational Studies at The Ohio State University (OSU), praised ABCC for their recent efforts.
“I think ABCC’s willingness to think outside the box regarding identity centers is an excellent step in the right direction,” says Patton Davis, a professor in the higher education and student affairs program at OSU.
Though ABCC’s largest component is Black, Hord says “our 30 years of studying the crosscurrents of the four ethnic groups now at the head of the organization allows us to see clearly now that race, though terribly real in life consequences and a social construction, must be dislodged as a biological fact if we are to stand a chance of avoiding its death sting of more than a half millennium.”
