African American Studies

The Association for Black Culture Centers is committed to your professional development. We offer workshops at our conferences and book recommendations to help you better understand history and culture. We encourage our members and affiliates to build community among ethnic groups through culture centers at colleges and universities. Together, we can explore the historical and contemporary connections African descended people have with Latinos, Asian Americans and Native Americans.

ASALH’s mission is to create and disseminate knowledge about Black History, to be, in short, the nexus between the Ivory Tower and the global public.

NCBS was formed out of the substantial need for a national stabilizing force in the developing discipline of Africana/Black Studies. The roots of NCBS run deep in the evolutionary growth of the discipline given that the organization was formed only seven years after the establishment of the first Black Studies Program in the United States. Today, the purpose of the NCBS is multidimensional and the scope of its functioning is quite broad. As an organization created and sustained primarily by students and their teachers, NCBS is committed to academic excellence and social responsibility.

The Universities Studying Slavery (USS) consortium, created and led by the University of Virginia, represents a multi-institutional collaboration focused in sharing best practices and guiding principles about truth-telling projects addressing human bondage and racism in institutional histories. Member schools are all committed to research, acknowledgment, and atonement regarding institutional ties to the slave trade, to enslavement on campus or abroad, and to enduring racism in school history and practice.

The National Council for Black Studies (NCBS) is the leading organization of Black Studies professionals in the world. NCBS exists to promote academic excellence and social responsibility in the discipline of Africana/Black Studies through the production and dissemination of knowledge, professional development and training, and advocacy for social change and social justice.

ASALH is itself part of African American History treated, as Carter G. Woodson often said, as “a negligible factor” in American and world history. While he labored with a singularity of purpose, Woodson did not work alone. His co-workers at the Association were many, ranging from college presidents and government officials, to celebrated poets and philosophers, to everyday folks in rural hamlets. To explore the history of ASALH is to glimpse a people’s strivings, their institution building. To bring that history to life in one’s imagination is to walk with giants.