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CSUDH News

The primary source of news and information about California State University, Dominguez Hills, its students, faculty, and staff.

African American

Press-Telegram: Experts, Scholars Talk Juneteenth, Societal Change During Groundbreaking CSU Symposium

June 17, 2022 By Lilly McKibbin

Obioha Ogbonna
CSUDH ASI President Obioha Ogbonna

Source: Long Beach Press-Telegram

The two-day event – titled “By Any Means Necessary: Synthesizing the Voices of Our Ancestors and Everyday People” – aims to engage and support Black students in their pursuit of college success, prosperity and self-fulfillment, Cal State officials said.

CARSON – Discussion focusing on higher education in the Black community, the meaning of celebrating Juneteenth and the importance of amplifying diverse voices on Cal State University campuses are some of the key points being discussed during the Inaugural Juneteenth Symposium, hosted by Cal State Dominguez Hills and livecast throughout the CSU system.

The two-day event – titled “By Any Means Necessary: Synthesizing the Voices of Our Ancestors and Everyday People” – aims to engage and support Black students in their pursuit of college success, prosperity and self-fulfillment, Cal State officials said.

“This event was a long time coming,” said, the CSU system’s interim chancellor, during the first of the event’s two days.

“Many of the CSU campuses have celebrated Juneteenth for years with performances, displays, lectures, symposiums that recognized the rich history and achievements of our Black and African American students, faculty and staff,” Koester said. “But this is the first time that we have linked arms at the system level to evoke systemic change.”

The panels on Wednesday and Thursday feature a lineup of national figures and scholars. Also on the agenda: performances by CSU students and other special guests.

On the first day of the symposium, more than 600 attendees attended in-person and at least another 1,300 were online watching the livestream.

William Franklin, vice president of student affairs at CSU Dominguez Hills, opened the first session to describe the “voyage” of the event, which would include discussions on how to serve, celebrate but also interrupt and instigate the community.

Opening remarks were also delivered by Obioha Ogbonna, president of CSUDH Associated Students Inc. Ogbonna described how his views changed about celebrating Juneteenth since he arrived from Nigeria to study cyber security.

“What does Juneteenth mean to me now? It’s an opportunity to meet and connect with my brothers [and] sisters here in the present and look back at the past at what separated us,” Ogbonna said. “I hope we learn a lot from this symposium and we get closer to reconnecting the link that was broken.”

Juneteenth is celebrated on or around June 19 each year to commemorate the emancipation of enslaved people in the U.S. The holiday was first marked in Texas, where in the aftermath of the Civil War, slaves were declared free under the terms of the 1862 Emancipation Proclamation.

Earlier this year, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, giving federal employees the day off to celebrate the new holiday. As celebrations have blossomed in popularity in recent years, some cities and other local entities have also decided to make the day an official paid holiday.

Framing the discussion during Wednesday’s symposium was Thomas Parham, president of CSU Dominguez Hills. Parham emphasized that true societal change will not be possible until Black voices are not heard and become enmeshed in the processes of government.

“If Juneteenth is to have real meaning and not simply represent another programmatic initiative that we can feel good about because we put it on and check the box, then our efforts over these next two days must integrate the biases and assumptions that we bring with us into the academic spaces we occupy,” Parham said.

“Our efforts must develop new and substantial programs that address the true needs of African descent students, staff and faculty and senior administrators that we claim to care about,” he added.

Keynote speakers include: Tyrone Howard, professor of education in the School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA; Shaun Harper, a professor at USC; and Cornel West, author and professor emeritus at Princeton University.

West described how Black excellence comes with learning history, and working on finding a voice today to forge changes in the community.

“When you get deep enough into Blackness you have a human connection that makes you international, global and universal rooted in the local,” West said in his speech. “And you can’t do that if you don’t find your voice.”

To virtually attend the concluding day of the CSU Inaugural Juneteenth Symposium on Thursday, visit www.calstate.edu.

EdSource: Cal State Juneteenth Symposium Focuses on Racial Progress Beyond Campus Diversity

June 17, 2022 By Lilly McKibbin

CSUDH President Parham
CSUDH President Thomas Parham

Source: EdSource

In Cal State’s first biennial Juneteenth symposium, the nation’s largest public university confronts the need for societal change that uplifts Black students, faculty and staff. 

The symposium, which was hosted in person and virtually by CSU Dominguez Hills on Wednesday and Thursday, featured Princeton University professor and author Cornel West, Grammy Award-nominated singer and actress Angie Stone, University of Southern California professor Shaun Harper, UC Irvine professor Michele Goodwin, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and other academics and student advocates from across the state.

The symposium went beyond higher education and covered reproductive health, medical disparities and voting rights. 

“We want to set the standard for what all of higher education in this nation ought to be thinking about in celebrating this Juneteenth holiday,” said Thomas Parham, president of the Dominguez Hills campus, located south of Los Angeles. “I want us to start with the fact that there is a lot of folk who look at diversity, equity and inclusion in the context of demographics … we kind of check the boxes and say we’re making diversity progress.” 

But that’s a “very basic” way of measuring progress, Parham said. 

“The question we want people to interrogate is, given these demographics, how have the policies and practices of our institutions and agencies changed?” he said. 

People who spend time on campuses are seeing more people from different ethnic, racial or religious backgrounds, but policies and practices remain the same, Harper said. 

“Until we do right by Black people, everything that we do in the name of racial justice will fail.  It will be incomplete,” Harper said. 

Ed Bush, president of Consumes River College – one of the 116 California community colleges – said part of the problem is that making more racially equitable changes doesn’t always benefit the status quo. 

“Even when we get Black people in the system, you don’t feel like you are able to be Black, so you don’t lean into your authentic self that will allow you to have the greatest benefit for Black students,” Bush said, adding that the California Master Plan for Higher Education needs to be redesigned to more closely improve education for Black people. 

During the symposium, Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who started her career as a professor at San Diego State University, said as a college graduate, she never thought she would be fighting the same battles for education and voting rights that her grandfather did. 

“Juneteenth never stood as a celebration but rather as a stark reminder of our country’s continual struggle to have its civil rights laws and edicts align with the action of providing the freedom, the opportunity and social justice mandated,” she said, adding that educators must better prepare citizens of their role in understanding our democracy. 

“It is not OK when only 37% of the population votes over the last two years,” Weber said. 

Weber, who pushed for ethnic studies requirements across the state’s higher education sectors, and was an advocate of eliminating standardized testing, said she told Gov. Gavin Newsom that if he wants to fight institutional racism the first place to start is the “ivory tower” of academia. 

Other than the state’s community college system, the CSU reaches nearly every student in the state, Weber said. And with that power, the system has a “unique opportunity to push forward, not with the same old rules and regulations that we’ve had for years to produce the same old folks, but for so many who are left behind and left out.” 

The system also has a responsibility to the K-12 system, as the largest trainer of future teachers and educators, Weber said, adding that California has the fifth-largest economy in the world but routinely ranks in the 40s and 50s for K-12 education and funding. 

“That is embarrassing,” she said. “I deal with members in the Assembly that won’t put their own children in public schools. Why? Because they want them to be successful. That is a reality we have to face.” 

Parham said there’s no one solution to solve the issues or problems the symposium addressed, but he hopes people across the CSU will really examine their own campuses and policies and make intentional improvements. 

“How can the system, the largest system of public higher education in all of America … develop programs that massively assert the dignity, worth and humanity of African-descent people, staff, faculty, students?” he asked.

LAist/KPCC: Cal State University Commemorates Juneteenth With First Biennial Conference

June 17, 2022 By Lilly McKibbin

Dr. Cornell West and President Parham
Dr. Cornell West and CSUDH President Thomas Parham

Source: LAist

This story also had a radio segment on KPCC.

On June 19, 1865 – more than two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation – enslaved Black Americans in Galveston, Texas, finally received word that they were free.

That day, known as Juneteenth, was declared a national holiday last year. To commemorate it, the Cal State University system held a two-day symposium this week, the first of what will now be a biennial event.

Dr. Thomas Parham, president of Cal State Dominguez Hills, said:

“We are not simply acknowledging Juneteenth by putting on a program that lasts for a couple hours, then everybody goes home. We want people to be inspired, and we want people to be impressed. But I want them to take that inspiration and translate it into specific activity, to interrogate the assumptions they bring with them into academic spaces and to see where their biases might be anti-Black.”

Parham volunteered to host the inaugural event at Cal State Dominguez Hills. In his view, it was the ideal place to launch. When the campus first opened in the early ’60s, it was located in Rolling Hills Estates, an affluent city in the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Then, following the Watts Rebellion in 1965, the campus was relocated to Carson, where the South Bay meets South L.A., so as to better serve the county’s urban core.

“We are born out of those social justice roots,” said Parham, who also noted that Cal State Dominguez Hills has one of the highest percentages of Black students in the CSU system.

The symposium, titled “By Any Means Necessary: Synthesizing the Voices of Our Ancestors and Everyday People,” was originally set to take place just off campus. But demand to participate was high, said Parham, so the university moved the event to the Hyatt Regency hotel near LAX. There, some 650 students, alumni, faculty and community members gathered to listen to a broad range of speakers, from philosopher and activist Dr. Cornel West to Dr. Shirley Weber, California’s Secretary of State.

The event has been years in the making, Parham added, and was first envisioned by student leaders following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd.

At the time, Maryana Khames served as student trustee for the CSU, representing the system’s more than 485,000 students.

As civil unrest spread throughout the country, Khames interviewed dozens of students, asking what they’d like to see in response.

Those conversations, she said, revealed that “the community was experiencing a lot of pain,” especially among Black students. Together, they developed the idea for the symposium.

“We wanted a place to celebrate Black excellence,” said Khames, “but we also wanted to look at our system from the inside out and figure out what we need to do to improve it.”

Khames, who immigrated from Iraq, graduated from San Diego State last month. She was moved to see the event come to fruition, proud that it celebrated African American history while highlighting the need to better support Black students.

At the event, Dr. Shaun Harper, a business and education professor at USC, addressed the need to make campuses more welcoming to Black students. Over the past 18 years, he’s interviewed more than 10,000 college students of all backgrounds. He’s also surveyed over 2 million more. Time and again, he said, Black students reported feeling unwelcome at their own campuses and getting called the N-word, most often by peers, but sometimes by school employees.

Harper encouraged the CSU to launch its own inquiry and use that data to transform the racial climate across its 23 campuses.

“If we’re going to sustain the seriousness of these two days, synthesizing the voices of our ancestors and everyday people, don’t you think you’d want to know [if] your Black students are being terrorized in the same way that our Black ancestors were?” he asked.

Diversity, equity and inclusion have become trendy, Harper added, but it needs to be taken seriously. Sending graduates unequipped to engage with people unlike themselves out into the world, he said, makes higher education institutions “complicit in the cyclical reproduction of racism.”

Daily Breeze: CSUDH Receives $1.6 Million to Preserve Historic Music from African Diaspora

October 7, 2020 By Paul Browning

The Albert McNeil Jubilee Singers in Italy in 1996.
The Albert McNeil Jubilee Singers in Italy in 1996.

Source: Daily Breeze

The Michigan-based Georgia and Nolan Payton Foundation has offered Carson’s Cal State Dominguez Hills a $1.6 million gift that will help preserve historic musical performances and songs for the new Center For African Diaspora Sacred Music and Musicians.

Formerly known as the African Diaspora Sacred Music and Musicians Program, it already includes the Georgia and Nolan Payton Archive of Sacred Music. The program, which focuses on music created and performed in Southern California, is internationally recognized for its preservation and promotion of African Diaspora music, which dates from the days Black people were enslaved.

“The investment in support of our Center for African Diaspora Sacred Music and Musicians is a cherished gift that will continue to give for generations to come,” said CSUDH President Thomas A. Parham in a statement.

“If the challenge to current generations is to build upon and extend the legacies left by our ancestors,” he added, “then this bestowal by the Payton family will help fulfill that promise.”

The Payton Archive consists of oral histories, as well as audio and visual materials. It includes the works of Los Angeles-based African Diaspora musicians and a number of special collections.

Image from the online exhibit “Will the Circle Be Unbroken: The Sacred Music of the African American Diaspora.” exhibition, curated from the holdings of the Georgia and Nolan Payton Archive. (Courtesy African American Music Collections, Gerth Archives and Special Collections, Cal State Dominguez Hills).

Professor Emerita of Music Hansonia Caldwell, who founded the African Diaspora Sacred Music and Musicians Program at Cal State Dominguez Hills, called the foundation’s latest donation “thrilling.

“Over the years, the programs and materials supported by the foundation have added tremendously to the educational experience we have been able to provide the students of CSUDH,” she said in a statement. “Additionally, it has ensured the preservation and celebration of an important part of the African Diaspora cultural heritage of California.”

Other projects funded by the foundation include, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken: The Sacred Music of the African American Diaspora,” exhibit, curated from the holdings of the archive, which opened on campus in February, but was later moved online.

The exhibit showcases the role sacred music plays in the cultural institutions of the African American communities of Los Angeles and how those traditions have affected the politics and social structures on the region.

CSUDH Receives $1.6 Million for Center for African Diaspora Sacred Music and Musicians

September 29, 2020 By Kandis Newman

CSUDH Receives $1.6 Million for New Center for African Diaspora Sacred Music and Musicians
Images from the Hansonia Caldwell Collection and the Virginia White Collection, courtesy of CSUDH’s Gerth Archives and Special Collections.

California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) has received a $1.6 million gift to create an endowment that will support historic and innovative research, preservation, and performance activities hosted by the new Center for African Diaspora Sacred Music and Musicians, located in CSUDH’s College of Arts and Humanities.

The gift was donated by the Georgia and Nolan Payton Foundation. The funds will support a variety of activities hosted by the center, including the continued preservation and digitization of new collections of spirituals, a broad arrangement of music/folk songs inspired by the hardships of enslaved Africans. Other endeavors will include gallery and museum exhibitions, festivals, and performances by visiting artists, commissioning of new choral compositions, a scholars-in-residence program, and grants for faculty scholarship and research.

“Our university is honored to receive this generous donation from the Georgia and Nolan Payton Foundation. The investment in support of our Center for African Diaspora Sacred Music and Musicians is a cherished gift that will continue to give for generations to come,” said CSUDH President Thomas A. Parham. “If the challenge to current generations is to build upon and extend the legacies left by our ancestors, then this bestowal by the Payton family will help fulfill that promise.”

Henrietta Fortson, a national officer of the National Association of Negro Musicians, examines the Don Lee White Collection in CSUDH's Gerth Archives and Special Collections. Photo by Judith Blakely.
Henrietta Fortson, a national officer of the National Association of Negro Musicians, examines the Don Lee White Collection in CSUDH’s Gerth Archives and Special Collections. Photo by Judith Blakely.

The Georgia and Nolan Payton Foundation has been a long-term supporter of the African Diaspora Sacred Music and Musicians (ADSMM) Program at CSUDH, which is internationally recognized for its preservation and promotion of African Diaspora music.

The foundation also helped establish the Georgia and Nolan Payton Archive of Sacred Music at CSUDH. The primary goal of the Payton Archive is to facilitate research and documentation of collections of African Diaspora sacred music created and performed by the multicultural population of Southern California.

The Payton Archive consists of music, books, periodicals, documents, audio and visual materials, and oral histories. It is also home to the works of Los Angeles-based African Diaspora musicians, beginning with the Hansonia Caldwell Special Collection, the Jester Hairston Special Collection, the Lillie Hill Jones Collection,  the Dr. Don Lee White Collection, and the most recently acquired Dr. Albert J. McNeil and the Albert J. McNeil Jubilee Singers Collection.

“Over the years, the programs and materials supported by the foundation have added tremendously to the educational experience we have been able to provide the students of CSUDH,” said Professor Emerita of Music Hansonia Caldwell, who founded the African Diaspora Sacred Music and Musicians program at CSUDH. “Additionally, it has ensured the preservation and celebration of an important part of the African Diaspora cultural heritage of California. It is absolutely thrilling for the university to receive this important gift, thus furthering the mission of the archive.”

Other Projects Supported by the Payton Foundation:

The “Will the Circle Be Unbroken: The Sacred Music of the African American Diaspora” exhibition, curated from the holdings of the Georgia and Nolan Payton Archive, opened at CSUDH in February 2020.

The exhibit showcases the role sacred music plays in the cultural institutions of the African American communities of Los Angeles, as well as the ways those traditions have impacted the politics, social structures, and history of African Americans in the Los Angeles region. The exhibit has been moved online due to COVID-19: https://scalar.usc.edu/works/will-the-circle-be-unbroken/index.

To build on the ADSMM Living Legends Concert Project, which began in 2003 featuring performances by contemporary musicians, CSUDH has commissioned a composition that celebrates the life and words of Harriet Tubman. The piece was composed by celebrated music artist and educator Rosephanye Powell, who was featured in the annual Living Legends Residency and Concert. The debut of the composition was scheduled for 2020, which has been postponed due to COVID-19.

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