AMHERST — Amilcar Shabazz, professor of history and Africana studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, recently became the president of the National Council for Black Studies.
“The National Council for Black Studies is committed to academic excellence, social responsibility and cultural grounding, and the sky’s the limit to what we will accomplish over the next 50 years,” Shabazz said in a press release.
For the previous few years, longtime council member Shabazz served as the group’s president and he was elevated to the president at the council’s conference in New Orleans, according to UMass.
At UMass, he’s taught in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies for more than a decade and served as the department chair. He teaches courses like the history of the civil rights movement and the education history of African American in the U.S., and is on the editorial board for several academic journals, including “The Journal of Black Studies.”
He is the author of the 2004 book “Advancing Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas,” and his biography of Carter Wesley, a lawyer, journalist and entrepreneur, is forthcoming, according to his UMass biography page.
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.