For the past several years, the Dr. N. Joyce Payne Center for Social Justice (CSJ) has been bringing together crucial voices and perspectives to positively impact Black life in American society.
And its impact on social issues has been dramatic, say scholars who add that the need for a social justice think tank, particularly with a focus on historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), is critically important.
“The Payne Center sees the challenges as well as the opportunities that exist for the Black community as being complex, defying simple solutions, but requiring the synergistic intellectual capacity of thought leaders across multiple fields of endeavor,” says Dr. Fred A. Bonner II, the Wilhelmina Delco Endowed Chair in Educational Leadership and the executive director of the Minority Achievement, Creativity and High-Ability Center, Prairie View A&M University, and a collaborator with CSJ.
Dr. N. Joyce Payne is founder of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), the national advocacy organization designed to support students who attend the 47 publicly supported HBCUs. In 2021, TMCF launched the CSJ to advance social justice for Black Americans. Rooted in the African American community, CSJ has become a recognized research center integrally connected to HBCUs. It brings together scholars, thought leaders, and community advocates to identify, evaluate, and study pressing issues and develop sustainable means of change that will have a positive impact on Black life.
“We intend to harness our collective resources to not only engage scholars at HBCUs in the research of the center, but to channel that pedagogy to the full range of human needs of the Black community,” says Payne in an interview with Diverse.
Purpose
CSJ has six primary areas of concentration: civic participation; economics and wealth; educational equity; the future of work; communities and environments; and organizational entities.
