Tag: Black Excellence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemia_Haynes

Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes (September 11, 1890 – July 25, 1980) was an American mathematician and educator. She was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in mathematics, which she earned from the Catholic University of America in 1943.^[1]

Euphemia Lofton was the first child and only daughter of William S. Lofton, a dentist and financier, and Lavinia Day Lofton, a kindergarten teacher. She was the valedictorian of M Street High School in 1907 and then graduated from Normal School for Colored Girls, now known as University of the District of Columbia, with distinction and a degree in education in 1909.^[2][3] She went on to earn an undergraduate mathematics major (and psychology minor) from Smith College in 1914.^[3] In 1917 she married Harold Appo Haynes, a teacher. The couple had no children. She gained a master’s degree in education from the University of Chicago in 1930. In 1943, she gained her PhD from The Catholic University of America with a dissertation, supervised by Aubrey E. Landry, entitled The Determination of Sets of Independent Conditions Characterizing Certain Special Cases of Symmetric Correspondences.^[1][3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Okikiolu

Kate Adebola Okikiolu (born 1965) is a British mathematician.^[2] She is known for her work with elliptic differential operators as well as her work with inner-city children.^[3]

Okikiolu was born in 1965 in England. Her father was George Olatokunbo Okikiolu, a renowned Nigerian mathematician^[4] and the most published black mathematician on record.^[5] Her British mother was a high school mathematics teacher. Okikiolu received a B.A. in mathematics from Cambridge University in 1987. In 1991 she earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Los Angeles,^[6] for her thesis The Analogue of the Strong Szego Limit Theorem on the Torus and the 3-Sphere.^[5][7][8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Blackwell

David Harold Blackwell (April 24, 1919 – July 8, 2010) was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics.^[2] He is one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem,^[3] and is also known for the Blackwell channel, Blackwell’s contraction mapping theorem, Blackwell’s approachability theorem, and the Blackwell order. He wrote one of the first Bayesian statistics textbooks, his 1969 Basic Statistics. He was the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the first African American full professor with tenure at the University of California, Berkeley,^[1][4][5] and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics.^[6] By the time he retired, he had published more than 90 papers and books on dynamic programming, game theory, and mathematical statistics.^[7] In 2012, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Blackwell the National Medal of Science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudley_Weldon_Woodard

Dudley Weldon Woodard (October 3, 1881 – July 1, 1965) was a Galveston-born American mathematician and professor, and the second African-American to earn a PhD in mathematics; the first was Woodard’s mentor Elbert Frank Cox, who earned a PhD from Cornell in 1925.

He received his B.A. degree from Wilberforce University in Ohio (1903), his B.S. degree (1906) and M.Sc. degree (1907) at the University of Chicago.^[1] He taught collegiate mathematics in Tuskegee for many years,^[2] until finally he earned his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania (1928).^[3] His doctoral thesis was entitled, On Two-Dimensional Analysis Situs with Special Reference to the Jordan Curve Theorem, and was advised by John R. Kline.^[4][5]

https://news.ucsb.edu/people/sabrina-strings

Sabrina Strings, Ph.D. is Professor and North Hall Chair of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was a recipient of the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship with a joint appointment in the School of Public Health and Department of Sociology. A certified yoga teacher, her work on yoga has been featured in The Feminist Wire, Yoga International, and LA Yoga. Sabrina is also an award-winning author with publications in diverse venues

Anise Vance is a writer from the African and Iranian diasporas. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Camden. As a Mitchell Scholar, he received an MPhil in Geography from Queen’s University Belfast. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and currently lives in North Carolina with his wife and two children.

In this post, Anise shares his experience of writing an emotionally draining novel that needed to be written, how his publishing team helped him, and more.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/anise-vance-792a2239

Assistant Director, Community Safety @ City of Durham

I build public systems that treat people as neighbors. Over the past decade with the City of Durham, I’ve served as Chief Data Officer and then as Assistant Director of the Community Safety Department, where I helped launch HEART — one of the nation’s most closely watched alternative 911 response programs, responding to tens of thousands of calls with unarmed, care-first teams. Now I lead efforts on Durham’s new Strategic Framework to Make Homelessness Rare and Brief, a city-county initiative to drastically reduce homelessness through coordinated governance, real-time data, and rapid housing placement. My work sits at the intersection of data, institutional design, and narrative: earlier in my career I led research on racial equity, housing, and criminal justice at the Boston Foundation, and I hold degrees in geography (Queen’s University Belfast, as a Mitchell Scholar) and creative writing (MFA, Rutgers–Camden). I’m also the author of Hush Harbor, a novel longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Whether the medium is a dashboard, a department, or a book, the project is the same: proving that our public institutions can be instruments of dignity — and that they work better when they are.

https://www.npr.org/2026/09/22/nx-s1-5973302/unarmed-911-responders-police-reform

On a recent Wednesday in Durham, N.C., Rob Crisp and Allie Craft were on a mission, equipped with snacks, bottled water and hygiene kits. They are part of Durham’s unarmed community response team, and they were looking for a man someone called 911 about.

“Our notes say we got a trespasser on a business property. He has a bunch of belongings, and he’s refusing to leave,” Crisp said.

In a parking lot on the side of a strip mall, they found the man, wearing a McDonald’s T-shirt and a backward baseball cap and toting several full garbage bags and a sofa with him. Crisp approached the man, who looked tense. He said he didn’t want anyone to touch his things.

Crisp, a peer support specialist who has struggled with drug addiction in the past, took his time talking with him.

“I can relate to not having anything,” Crisp later told NPR. After a few minutes, he calmed the man down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9e_Benton

Denée Benton (born December 31, 1991^[1]) is an American actress and singer. She is best known for her performance as Natasha Rostova in the 2016 musical Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 on Broadway, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award.^[2][3] Benton’s other Broadway credits include the role of Eliza Hamilton in Hamilton (2018) and the role of Cinderella in Into the Woods (2022).^[4][5] Her television acting credits include UnREAL and the role of journalist Peggy Scott on The Gilded Age.

https://polisci.northwestern.edu/people/core-faculty/alvin-tillery.html

Alvin B. Tillery, Jr.’s research and teaching interests are in the fields of American politics and political theory. His research in American politics focuses on racial and ethnic politics, American political development, and social movements. His research in political theory focuses on American political thought and critical race theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasmin_Savoy_Brown

Jasmin Savoy Brown (born March 21, 1994) is an American actress. She^[a] is known for starring in the thriller drama series Yellowjackets (2021–present) and the slasher franchise Scream (2022–present).

Brown appears in the supernatural series The Leftovers (2015–2017) and the legal drama series For the People (2018–2019), the slasher film Sound of Violence (2021), and the thriller film Missing (2023). They also play Phin Mason / Tinkerer in the video game Spider-Man: Miles Morales (2020).