Noted social historian, award-winning author, and educational leader, Earl Lewis, is the founding director of the University of Michigan Center for Social Solutions. Also the Thomas C. Holt Distinguished University Professor of History, Afroamerican and African Studies, and public policy, Lewis is president emeritus of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2013-18), one of the premier philanthropies supporting the arts, humanities, and higher education. At Michigan, Lewis and colleagues in the center are addressing four core areas of social concern: diversity and race, slavery and its aftermath, water and security, and the dignity of labor in an automated world. Prior to returning to Michigan and before leading the Mellon Foundation, he served as the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at Emory University as well as the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History and African American Studies (2004-2012). Lewis was previously on the faculty at the University of Michigan (
Editor’s note: From time to time, The Conversation asks leaders in America’s colleges and universities to address some of the most pressing issues in our nation. Here we ask Earl Lewis, director and founder of the University of Michigan’s Center for Social Solutions, and Nancy Cantor, chancellor of Rutgers University – Newark, a diverse, urban public research university, about how numbers and statistics matter when examining institutional racism, the Capitol riot and Black Lives Matter.
How has media reporting on numbers and statistics affected the public’s view of race?
Nancy Cantor: Society’s accounting of the summer of 2020 through Inauguration Day 2021 demonstrates the hard way numbers play into a long-standing history of racism and white privilege. Some national leaders equated a crowd of mostly white Capitol Hill rioters to largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests. Yet analyses show that the overall levels of violence and property destruction during BLM protes
Emory joins national Mellon Foundation research project to address racial reparations
Emory University will be part of a $5 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded to the University of Michigan’s Center for Social Solutions, led by former Emory Provost Earl Lewis, as part of the Foundation’s Just Futures initiative. “Crafting Democratic Futures: Situating Colleges and Universities in Community-based Reparations Solutions” emerges from the Center for Social Solutions’ focus on slavery and its aftermath, and is informed by three generations of humanistic scholarship and what that scholarship suggests for all seeking just futures. More information here.
The team of scholars will be led by historian Carol Anderson, Emory’s Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and department chair. The team also includes Emory College faculty members Vanessa Siddle Walker, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Studies, and AAS assistant
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Mary Estime-Irvin, a councilwoman in North Miami, Fla., writes the name of a friend lost to COVID-19 on a symbolic tombstone that is part of a pandemic memorial at Griffing Park in North Miami in October. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
While millions wait for a lifesaving shot, the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus continues to soar upward with horrifying speed. On Tuesday, the last full day of Donald Trump s presidency,
the official death count reached 400,000 a once-unthinkable number. More than 100,000 Americans have perished in the pandemic in just the past five weeks.
Emory University will be part of a $5 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded to the University of Michigan’s Center for Social Solutions and multiple higher education partners as part of the Foundation’s Just Futures initiative.
The project, which will span three years, creates and leverages a national network of college and university-based humanities scholars working in partnerships with community-based organizations to develop research-informed reparation plans for each location.
Emory will be among the network of nine geographically dispersed and organizationally different colleges and universities that will involve community fellows as well as local organizations in a collaborative public history reckoning designed to offer tangible suggestions for community-based racial reparations solutions.