There is a rich history of Black graduation ceremonies in the United States focused on celebrating the unique experiences and achievements of Black university students. In Canada, the tradition gained attention with the University of Toronto’s 2017 celebration. Since then, annual Black graduation ceremonies have been embraced by many other institutions, including McMaster University, Toronto Metropolitan University and Concordia University. […]

The Ontario government has introduced legislation that will make its school boards run more like businesses. The recently announced Putting Student Achievement First Act reduces the power of elected trustees and creates a powerful new chief executive officer (CEO) position to head school boards. Unlike previous directors of education who were required to have education backgrounds and shared power with […]

Over 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education, public schools in the U.S. remain deeply segregated. AP Photo/Phil Long John Washington, now in his 50s, attended a public elementary and middle school in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia and then went to a large magnet high school, a type of public school that has a selective admission process. […]

Jackson State University students attend an event in Mississippi in October 2025. Aron Smith/Jackson State University via Getty Images Historically Black colleges and universities, often known as HBCUs, are well known for their deep roots in U.S. higher education and proven effectiveness at graduating Black students who go on to become professionally successful. HBCUs are colleges and universities that were […]

GaudiLab/Shutterstock Across the UK, Black students remain significantly underrepresented in doctoral programmes. This is despite years of widening participation policies and a growing awareness that the pathways into a PhD are often far harder to navigate for some groups than others. My research with colleagues shows that a different approach is possible: one that draws on long-standing African philosophies of […]

Updated: November 1, 2015 In the article below, Carlton McLellan, PhD, Founding Director of The American Ambassadors Project and Senior Fellow with the Association of Black American Ambassadors (ABAA), briefly describes the history of the more than one hundred and sixty-six black women and men who have led diplomatic delegations as U.S. Ambassadors in one hundred and eight nations around […]

Members of the Black Student Union at Kutztown University in Kutztown, Pa., march in a protest in April 2015. Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images Black student unions have been a vital part of many Black college students’ lives for more than 60 years. But since 2024, Black student unions have lost their institutional support, campus space and funding […]

María Remedios del Valle, also known as the “Madre de la Patria” (“Mother of the Homeland”), was a soldier, nurse, and military heroine during the Argentine Wars of Independence against Spain. She became a driving force in the fight for freedom and eventually rose to the rank of sergeant major of the cavalry while serving the United Provinces of the […]

Quintard Taylor Jr., historian, author, and professor, was a leading scholar in the fields of African American history and the history of the American West, as well as the visionary founder of BlackPast.org, the world’s largest online African American and Global African encyclopedia. Born in Brownsville, Tennessee, in 1948, to Quintard, Sr. and Grace Taylor, Taylor discovered his lifelong passion […]

In the article below, Rodney J. Reed, former Grand Sire Archon of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity and author of A Grand Journey: The History of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, 1904-2010, briefly outlines the history of the oldest continuously existing Black Greek-letter fraternity in the United States. Founded on May 15, 1904, Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, also known as the Boulé, […]