Black History
Stanford Libraries receives major Black music collection, supporting new department and expanding possibilities for research
Last Updated on August 7, 2024 by Daily News Staff
The Dijkstra Black Music Collection includes over 8,000 vinyl discs spanning the history of Jazz, Blues, Reggae, and R&B
STANFORD, Calif. /PRNewswire/ — Bram Dijkstra, professor emeritus at UC San Diego, and renowned literary agent Sandra Dijkstra have donated their music collection, nearly 65 years in the making, of irreplaceable recordings of jazz, Jamaican music, blues, soul, and other genres.
Stanford Libraries has accepted the generous donation of the Dijkstra Black Music Collection, a selection of approximately 8,000 commercial vinyl discs in near mint condition. “The collection is remarkable in its scope, depth, and curatorial vision,” said Michael A. Keller, the Ida M. Green University Librarian at Stanford.
About half of the discs in the Dijkstra collection document the work of essential twentieth-century jazz artists, creating a core jazz library that according to Keller “complements and dramatically enriches Stanford’s existing holdings, including the Monterey Jazz Festival Collection and the Riverwalk Jazz Collection.” The unparalleled corpus of Jamaican popular music, which includes representation of instrumentalists, vocalists, and DJs, establishes a new research strength for Stanford.
Once the collection is catalogued and available for use, Stanford will follow audio preservation best practices to protect the integrity of the discs and will provide digital listening access to students, faculty, and researchers while welcoming them to examine the physical discs, sleeves, and liner notes by appointment at Stanford’s Archive of Recorded Sound (ARS).
“The ARS was founded in 1958 to preserve sound recordings as a core part of our cultural heritage,” said Tamar Barzel, head music librarian at Stanford. “The Dijkstra Black Music Collection will have a meaningful and profound effect on ARS collections, which have historically been strongest in early jazz, classical music, and opera.”
Bram Dijkstra’s diligence and passion for documenting the full sweep of jazz history and Jamaican popular music has been a lifelong pursuit. Dijkstra, who was born on a small Indonesian island and raised in Holland, traces its inception to a transformative experience listening to a new record by the New Miles Davis Quintet in 1955. “I admired Miles Davis’ clear, coherent trumpet, but I was shocked into incredulous admiration by the hoarse, abrasive, yet melodious solos of the young tenor saxophone player Miles was featuring here for the first time, someone with the rather strange name of John Coltrane,” said Dijkstra. He recalled that Coltrane’s playing, “rough-toned and oddly jagged, daringly dancing on the edge of failure, but driven by an inner rhythm that steadied every part,” seemed to express what he was feeling – it “made almost physically tangible the music that was in my soul.”
That initial impression endured, inspiring a relocation to the United States, an immersion in African American music, and a commitment to creative work. John Coltrane, he wrote, “taught me to listen to Black music in all its many forms: Coltrane called me to America. He taught me that to be creative is to always search for what is better—and that searching for anything likely to make us better is never neat.”
Original and early pressings in the collection represent the best extant examples for many of Coltrane’s recordings. Rare individual discs, including Bob Marley’s original 12-inch 45rpm single of “Buffalo Soldiers,” Sun Ra’s original Saturn issues with blank or hand-made covers, and early hip hop LPs, are also rich in research potential.
“Recordings are essential primary sources for contemporary music scholarship,” remarked Professor Stephen Hinton, chair of Stanford’s Music Department. “As we expand our programmatic offerings in the areas of jazz studies, popular music, and ethnomusicology, the Dijkstra Black Music Collection will be an indispensable resource for research and teaching.”
Deep runs and other exceptional rarities are found within the Dijkstra Black Music Collection, including a full run of the Blue Note 1500 series of the late 1950s; virtually all John Coltrane commercial releases; a strong representation of avant-garde artists on small label releases from the U.S., Europe, and Japan; and a significant complement of artists’ private-issue and limited-edition releases. The collection’s appraised valuation exceeding $2.3 million reflects the many one-of-a-kind and extremely rare items, which are both of immense worth in the collectors’ market and priceless in their cultural heritage and research value.
The donated collection arrives at a fortuitous moment in Stanford’s history in tandem with the formation of the new African and African American Studies Department. Professor Ato Quayson, chair of the English Department, also chairs the Framework Task Force subcommittee focused on the departmentalization of African and African American Studies. “The Dijkstra Black Music Collection will instigate whole new research agendas in different areas of Black music studies,” said Quayson. “It will be a boon to the Stanford community, and indeed to anyone beyond who wants to take jazz, popular music, and ethnomusicology seriously.”
An event celebrating the collection is scheduled for February 13, 2023 from 5:30 p.m. at the Cecil H. Green Library on Stanford’s historic campus. The event is free and registration is requested. The collection will remain unavailable while it is being processed; inquiries about the collection can be submitted to the Archive of Recorded Sound at Stanford Libraries.
SOURCE Stanford Libraries
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HBCUs Do More Than Boost Opportunity — Research Suggests They Can Also Help Reduce Incarceration Risk
Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) play a crucial role in supporting Black students’ educational and socioeconomic advancement. By providing affordable education and mentorship, HBCUs help reduce crime rates among graduates. Despite funding challenges, their impact includes higher graduation rates and economic mobility, which help break cycles of poverty and incarceration.
Historically Black colleges and universities do more than offer Black youths a pathway to opportunity and success – I teach criminology, and my research suggests another benefit
Andrea Hagan, Loyola University New Orleans
Historically Black colleges and universities, often known as HBCUs, are well known for their deep roots in U.S. higher education and proven effectiveness at graduating Black students who go on to become professionally successful.
HBCUs are colleges and universities that were established before 1964, with the mission of educating Black Americans, though now anyone can attend.
As a criminology instructor who has spent 13 years studying the relationship between educational trajectories and criminal justice – and a Black woman who grew up in the South and attended an HBCU – I believe that HBCUs offer another often overlooked benefit.
They give young people, especially Black people, a pathway in higher education that they might not otherwise receive. By opening doors to education, jobs and mentorship, HBCUs disrupt the conditions that can cause young people – especially Black people – to get lost in the criminal justice system.
The U.S. incarcerates approximately 1.6 million people. Black Americans are locked up at five times the rate of white Americans. This disparity starts young: Black teenagers are 5.6 times more likely to be placed in juvenile detention than white teenagers, and people who are incarcerated as juveniles are nearly four times more likely to be incarcerated as adults. Overall, the vast majority of Black people are not incarcerated.
Attending a HBCU, or any other university, does not guarantee a stable financial future. And not graduating from high school or college certainly does not not mean that someone will become incarcerated.
But research shows that education, especially a college degree, is closely linked to lower crime rates. College graduates who do commit crimes reoffend at rates below 6%, while people who drop out of high school return to prison at rates around 75%.
This is why I believe HBCUs in particular have an important role to play in helping young Black people avoid this path.
Understanding HBCUs
Today, there are roughly 100 HBCUs in 19 states, as well as the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The schools are a mix of public schools and private, nonprofit colleges and universities.
HBCUs make up just 3% of the country’s colleges and universities. But their graduates include 40% of Black engineers, 50% of Black lawyers and 70% of Black doctors in the United States.
Most HBCUs are located in Southern and mid-Atlantic states – a legacy of when segregation barred Black students from attending most colleges and universities.
Many HBCUs are also located in rural Southern communities, in particular. Residents of these areas tend to live in poverty and have limited educational opportunities.
Attending a local HBCU is often one of the most practical ways these prospective students can get a degree – in part because HBCUs are often more affordable than other four-year college options.
The average annual tuition for an in-state student at a public HBCU is roughly US$7,700 per year – well below the national average, which ranges from $12,000 at public schools to $45,000 at private schools. Some public HBCUs charge as little as $1,000 in annual tuition for in-state students.
Schools like Coppin State University in Baltimore and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore also offer in-state rates to out-of-state students from places that do not have HBCUs nearby.
Despite their focus on Black students, HBCUs are increasingly diverse.
In 2022, non-Black students made up 24% of the student population at HBCUs. By comparison, 15% of non-Black students made up HBCU populations in 1976.
HBCUs also enroll low-income students, regardless of race, at three times the rate that predominantly white colleges do.
Upward mobility
Research shows completing high school reduces arrest rates by 11% to 12% for both property and violent crimes, regardless of race or economic background.
College takes this effect further.
Studies have found that college enrollment helps young people with histories of delinquency to stop committing crimes. Completing a four-year degree reduces the likelihood of criminal behavior by 43% to 48%, compared to those who started college but did not finish.
A few long-recognized reasons help explain this pattern. Education increases earning potential, making crime a riskier and less attractive option for people with a degree. Education also encourages long-term thinking, strengthens ties to employers and communities, and builds problem-solving skills that help people navigate challenges.
I have seen firsthand, through my own experiences growing up in the South and teaching students, how HBCUs can help move Black students out of poverty. These schools stand out among other colleges in terms of how effectively they graduate low-income Black students and move them into the middle class, outcomes that research links to reduced criminal behavior.
When researchers rank colleges by whether and how their students improve their socioeconomic status, income and wealth over time, more than half of the highest-performing schools are HBCUs.
Black students who attend HBCUs are 30% more likely to earn a degree than Black students who attend colleges that are not HBCUs. Black HBCU graduates are also likely to earn more money than Black non-HBCU college graduates.
This matters because poverty is one of the strongest predictors of whether someone will commit a crime.
When colleges and universities graduate students who earn middle-class incomes, they help break what researchers call the cycle of intergenerational poverty and incarceration. This pattern describes how children of incarcerated parents are six times more likely to end up in the justice system.
An ongoing money problem
Despite their benefits, HBCUs have chronically struggled with funding. In recent decades, state governments have not given Black land-grant universities – meaning public colleges originally created through federal legislation to serve Black students during segregation – at least $12.8 billion the federal government said they were owed.
Recent federal support for HBCUs has been mixed, as the Trump administration has made widespread cuts to many universities and colleges.
In April 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order renewing the White House Initiative on HBCUs, a federal effort to help support these schools. At the time, he said that Black colleges had no reason to fear cuts.
But days later, Trump’s proposed 2026 budget included $64 million in cuts to Howard University, one of the oldest HBCUs.
In September 2025, the Trump administration redirected $435 million to HBCUs by cutting funds from grant programs that had supported Hispanic-serving institutions and other colleges that have a large proportion of Hispanic or other minority students.
The context that matters
The U.S. criminal justice system disproportionately affects Black people at every stage – from arrests to incarceration. Black Americans make up about 13% of the U.S. population but account for roughly 37% of all people in U.S. jails and prisons.
According to the National Academies of Sciences, the lifetime risk of imprisonment for Black men born between 1975 and 1979, and with less than a high school education, was about 68% – meaning nearly 7 in 10 in that group experienced incarceration at least once.
I have seen firsthand that when Black students from low-income backgrounds enroll at HBCUs, they become more likely to complete a degree and achieve the kind of financial stability that research shows helps reduce the risk of becoming caught up in the criminal justice system.
Andrea Hagan, Instructor of Criminology & Justice, Loyola University New Orleans, Loyola University New Orleans
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The Bridge is a section of the STM Daily News Blog meant for diversity, offering real news stories about bona fide community efforts to perpetuate a greater good. The purpose of The Bridge is to connect the divides that separate us, fostering understanding and empathy among different groups. By highlighting positive initiatives and inspirational actions, The Bridge aims to create a sense of unity and shared purpose. This section brings to light stories of individuals and organizations working tirelessly to promote inclusivity, equality, and mutual respect. Through these narratives, readers are encouraged to appreciate the richness of diverse perspectives and to participate actively in building stronger, more cohesive communities.
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McKinley Thompson: African American Auto Designer
The first-generation Bronco was designed by McKinley Thompson Jr., Ford’s first African American designer. This highlights his significant contribution to the automotive industry during Black History Month.
Last Updated on July 11, 2025 by Daily News Staff
The first-generation Bronco was designed by McKinley Thompson Jr., who was the first African American designer hired at Ford Motor Company.
Edited by: Rod Washington
Images: Ford Motor Company
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The Controversy Surrounding the Jackie Robinson Biography at the U.S. Naval Academy
The Trump administration’s push to ban Jackie Robinson’s biography from the U.S. Naval Academy Library highlights tensions over diversity narratives in education, sparking controversy and raising concerns about historical representation amid ongoing political divisiveness.
Last Updated on April 30, 2025 by Daily News Staff
Jackie Robinson, first baseman with the Brooklyn Dodgers, circa 1949.
In an alarming move reflecting ongoing tensions over diverse narratives in education and public discourse, the Trump administration is reportedly pushing to ban a biography of Jackie Robinson from the Nimitz Library at the U.S. Naval Academy. This follows a week of controversy sparked by the temporary removal and subsequent restoration of an article on Robinson’s Army service from the Pentagon’s website.
According to a report from The New York Times, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has directed the Naval Academy to review its library collection for works that embody themes of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The biography of Robinson, alongside around 900 other titles—including Martin Luther King Jr.’s autobiography and “Einstein on Race and Racism”—has been flagged for removal under this directive.
Cmdr. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for the Naval Academy, stated, “The U.S. Naval Academy is fully committed to executing and implementing all directives outlined in executive orders issued by the president and is currently reviewing the Nimitz Library collection to ensure compliance. The Navy is carrying out these actions with utmost professionalism, efficiency, and in alignment with national security objectives.”
With Hegseth scheduled to visit the Academy soon, it remains uncertain whether these controversial titles will be removed from the library before his arrival. The issue has sparked substantial outcry, particularly in light of the administration’s recent criticism over removing articles that celebrate influential figures in U.S. history, like Robinson and the Navajo code talkers.
In a discussion prompted by ESPN’s Jeff Passan, Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot reiterated the administration’s stance against diversity initiatives, indicating that some content may have been removed inadvertently. His comments drew significant backlash, leading to a follow-up statement emphasizing “patriotism and dedication to the warfighting mission” rather than racial or ethnic identities.
Robinson, a second lieutenant in the Army from 1942 to 1944, served with the 761st Tank Battalion, the first Black tank unit to see combat in World War II. His court-martial for refusing to adhere to a racist bus policy only underscores his enduring struggle against racial injustice, paving the way for his groundbreaking success in Major League Baseball as he broke the color barrier.
The Los Angeles Dodgers, Robinson’s team for a decade, are scheduled to visit President Trump at the White House to celebrate their 2024 World Series title this April, coinciding with Jackie Robinson Day. This timing juxtaposes their celebration of his legacy against the backdrop of an administration taking steps to diminish recognition of such key figures in American history.
As this situation unfolds, it raises critical questions about the role of educational institutions, historical representation, and the importance of equitable narratives in our national dialogue. In today’s divided political landscape, the removal of influential and diverse voices from public access can serve not just as a reflection of current priorities but also as a forewarning about the future of discourse surrounding diversity and inclusion in America.
Related article: https://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/article/trump-administration-reportedly-moves-to-ban-jackie-robinson-biography-from-naval-academy-library-235013259.html
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