NAACP

• Edna Cummings, decorated military veteran and accomplished leader, joins Windsor Group LLC as Vice President, bringing a wealth of experience in both the commercial and government space.
• BETHESDA, Md., Oct. 6, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Windsor Group LLC is pleased to announce the hiring of retired U.S. Army Colonel Edna W. Cummings as Vice President.
• Windsor Group President and CEO Diedre Windsor, commented, "We're very excited to have Edna join our team.
• She holds a Master of Strategic Studies from the Army War College, Carlise, PA, and an M.S.

• As one of the handful of Black teachers in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era of racially segregated public schools, she faced a daunting challenge in providing a first-class education to students considered second-class citizens.
• Before the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board decision that deemed segregated schools “separate and unequal,” the efforts of Black teachers went unheralded, underappreciated and virtually unknown.
• My research revealed at least one important lesson: What Black teachers face today is not that different from what we faced in the past.

In spite of it all

• What I found was that for Black people, education was in and of itself an act of active resistance against racial disenfranchisement.
• As education scholar Christopher Span explained in his 2012 seminal book “From Cottonfield to Schoolhouse”: “To be educated was to be respected; to be educated was to be a citizen.
• As a result, Black teachers used classrooms to not only impart the lessons of history, but also to encourage students to be actively involved in the fight for racial equity.

Education was paramount

• Here are a few that serve as lessons for today: Arguably the most important, the first is developing relationships and mentorships.
• Further solidifying those relationships was the fact that many of the teachers had taught several generations of families.
• Because of their teachers, Black students valued education and modeled their own behavior to achieve their own potential.
• She knew then that education was intended to be the great equalizer in America and the key to upward mobility – and she worked her entire career making sure that became a reality in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

• Page Jackson Alumni Association Inc.
• Page Jackson High School Tribute Exhibit Book: ‘Black Education in Jefferson County, West Virginia’
  Page Jackson High School (PJHS) plays a significant role in Black history within Jefferson County.
• The PJHS Tribute Exhibit is a room originally dedicated in 1986 by the NAACP that honors the accomplishments and activities of the staff, teachers, and students of PJHS.
• People who stutter often feel marginalized and stigmatized because of harmful stereotypes that exist in popular culture.

• In a 2019 article, The New York Times tried to find the origins of the use of the term for Howard when U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, one of the school’s most well-known alumnae, was still a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.
• It seemed intriguing to me as a longtime admirer of Malcolm X – and also as one who made the pilgrimage to the original Mecca in Saudi Arabia, as Malcolm famously did in 1964.
• Still, as a veteran education writer with an extensive history of covering historically Black colleges and universities – including Howard – I decided to dig deeper.

A new era

• This was – contrary to what The New York Times said about the term emerging after the death of Malcolm X in 1965 – nearly 15 years before he was even born.
• My finding comes at a time when Howard, located in Washington, D.C., is entering a new era.
• R-1 is a classification level reserved for universities that grant doctoral degrees and also have “very high research activity.”

Going way back

• Its founders envisioned Howard as a school for educating and training Black physicians, teachers and ministers from the nearly 4 million newly freed slaves.
• There, I did a simple search for the term “Mecca” and got more than 400 results, including the one from 1909.

The meaning of ‘The Mecca’

• It is most often meant to preserve Howard’s reputation as a beacon of Black thought.
• That first reference from February 1909 came in an article written by J.A.
• Mitchell, a student who referred to Howard as a potential Mecca for young Black students.
• A few years later, in a 1913 edition of the Howard University Journal, an article stated:
  “Howard is a strategic institution.

A different Mecca?

• Anyone familiar with the culture at Howard knows there’s a long-standing rivalry between Howard University and Hampton University, located in Hampton, Virginia, over which school is ‶the real HU.” My research shows there might have once been a debate over which school is “The Mecca” as well.
• When Booker T. Washington arrived at Hampton in 1872 – five years after Howard University was founded in 1867 – Hampton, Virginia, was known as the “Mecca of the ambitious colored youth of the dismantled South,” according to a 1910 Howard manuscript titled “A Ride with Booker T. Washington.” Hampton isn’t the only U.S. city to be known as a Black Mecca.
• As noted in a 1925 edition of “The Crisis” – the NAACP magazine founded in 1910 by W.E.B.
• DuBois – Washington, D.C., was “regarded as the Mecca of the American Negro, for here he is under the wing of the eagle and can’t be made the victim of hostile legislation or rules.” Around the same time, Alain Locke, who taught English and philosophy at Howard in the early 1910s and started the school’s philosophy department, proclaimed Harlem as the “Mecca of the new Negro.” Locke is also known as the “dean of the Harlem Renaissance.” The point is this idea of a Black Mecca was constantly shifting and continues to shift to this day.

The Mecca of the future

• Despite archival records that show Howard was called The Mecca as early as 1909, other details have yet to be discovered.
• Perhaps under the leadership of President Vinson, a champion of digital scholarship, Howard students and scholars can continue to research how Howard came to be known as The Mecca.