During Black History Month and beyond, academic institutions engage in genuine efforts to promote the integration of African-American experience into the educational system. It is central to the American story.

Education can quash stereotypes and myths that have defined race relations for centuries and pave a path toward improved race relations.

In his The Souls of Black Folk (1903), author W.E.B. Du Bois asked in the closing pages, “Would America have been America without her Negro people?” All of us have an obligation to work toward creating a society envisioned in those sparkling words of 1776: “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”