Black Women Climbing the Ladder of Success

by UrbanFaith Staff | May 21, 2014 | Headline News | 3 comments

About a month ago, many young black men were taking the world by storm with their admissions to multiple Ivy League universities. This month, and in particular over the last week, black women have made some serious moves up the ladder of success. The black women in this story aren’t corporate America titans though, they are making their moves through the ranks in academic administration to take up the titles of dean, president, and college graduate. Find out about some of these phenomenal women below:

The Rev. Bridgette Young Ross has been appointed dean of the chapel and spiritual life at Emory, beginning July 1. (Photo Credit: Emory Photo/Video)

After a seven month search that yielded over 130 nominations and applicants, Chicago native Rev. Bridgette Young Ross clenched the deal to succeed Rev. Susan Henry-Crowe as the new Dean of Chapel and Spiritual Life at Emory University. Ross is no stranger to Emory, having served as the associate dean of the chapel from 2000-2009 before she left to be the assistant general secretary of the United Methodist Church Board of Higher Education and Ministry in Nashville, Tennessee. As the dean of the chapel and spiritual life Ross will “engage students, faculty and staff in questions of spiritual meaning through collaborations with our various schools and divisions and she will both provide leadership on ethical issues confronting the university and represent the religious dimensions of Emory to the broader world,” said Emory President James Wagner. Click here for more information on Ross’s appointment.

Erika Hayes James has been named dean of Goizueta Business School, beginning July 15.( Photo Credit: Jim Carpenter)

Just about a stones throw away, Emory’s Goizueta Business School appointed Erika Hayes James as their new dean. James, who will begin in her new role on July 15, is the 95 year-old business school’s first African-American dean. She comes to Goizueta with a PhD in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan and years of experience working at the intersection of organizational psychology and executive leadership. James hopes to facilitate a deeper connection between the business school and Atlanta’s business community and other universities. Of this she says, “I see a real opportunity to align business thought leadership in Atlanta and, in the tradition of the academy, to bring research to bear on challenges.” For more information on her appointment, click here.

Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice the newly appointed CEO of Morehouse School of Medicine (Photo Credit: Courtesy of Morehouse School of Medicine)

Across town, Morehouse School of Medicine is in the process of welcoming Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice as their new president. Dr. Rice, a Harvard-educated and renowned obstetrician and gynecologist, will not only be MSM’s first female president but she will be the nation’s first African-American woman to lead a free-standing medical school. As an article in The Root indicated last year, Dr. Rice’s move is a significant because of the under-representation of black women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Dr. Rice will also encourage the next generation of medical practitioners with what she credits as her secret to success, “passion.” In the aforementioned Root article she stated, “The one thing I have always been fortunate to have is passion.” As a woman, Dr. Rice is also in touch with the fact that women are, primarily, the ones making health decisions for the family and she is concerned with helping them to take care of themselves and made better choices. She is credited with founding the Meharry Center for Women’s Health Research in Nashville, Tennessee, which is one of the nation’s first research facilities devoted to studying diseases that disproportionately impact women of color. Fortunately, Dr. Rice won’t have to do much moving to begin her new position, as she is currently dean of the school of medicine and the executive vice president.

Three generations from the same Hope Mills family are graduating with honors from different schools this spring. Kathleen Collins, left, and her daughter Tori Collins- Newcombe, center, are Fayetteville State graduates while Tori’s daughter Nmyia Collins, right, is an honor student at Massey Hill Classical and will graduate in June.

The last of the success stories is certainly not least and is also quite sweet. Earlier this month, three generations of family graduated from two schools. Kathleen Collins and her daughter Tori Collins-Newcombe both graduated from Fayetteville state with a bachelor’s degree in social work and sociology, respectively. Toni’s daughter, 18-year-old Nmyia, will graduate from Massey Hill Classical High School. So how did they do it? Obviously through plenty of hard work and studying, but they were also intentional about graduating together. Once Tori raised her children, she decided to enter Fayetteville State alongside her mother and take a heavy course load in order to graduate with her. Both mother and daughter plan to pursue masters’ degrees in social work while the youngest generation of the Collins family plans to major in biology at Winston-Salem State as the precursor to a career in medicine.

We salute these women and more across the nation and world who are making moves on the daily.

COMMENTARY: How Brown v. Board of Education Still Shapes Our Religious Life

by UrbanFaith Staff | May 20, 2014 | Headline News |

c. 2014 Religion News Service

(RNS) Not long ago, I visited Topeka, Kan., to teach at one of those grand old mainline churches that got caught in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education.

1961 Integration in schools (location/caption information unknown). (Photo Credit: Religion News Service file photo by Bruce Bailey)

It was around the corner from the modest home of a railroad worker named Oliver Brown who decided his daughter Linda shouldn’t have to attend an elementary school far from home just because the neighborhood school was for whites only.

The Supreme Court agreed and, in 1954, struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine that had allowed segregation in public schools. That decision set in motion the mass exodus of whites from urban neighborhoods.

So-called “white flight” suburbs sprang up just outside the borders of newly integrated school districts. New schools went up to attract white families, as did housing developments promising a better way of life, code for “whites-only.”

Some mainline congregations followed their white constituents out to the suburbs. Others stayed in beloved Gothic piles and, like the one I was visiting, tried to retain a former way of life while surrounded by new neighbors who didn’t identify with grand old hymns, starchy Sunday rituals and an attitude of charity, not welcome.

Churches that once served several thousand every Sunday dwindled to a few dozen stalwarts who, still decades later, expected people like themselves to discover their better way of being church.

Meanwhile, church leaders wonder why “millennials are leaving the church” and what magical mixture of doctrine and Sunday worship would draw them back. Reality is that congregations can’t “lose” younger cohorts they never had. It has been 50 years since a young-adult generation found urban mainline congregations appealing.

It’s the reality no one wants to address, because at the heart of it is the fact of race. Urban mainline churches “hollowed out” when their white constituents relocated to suburbs and those who remained couldn’t bring themselves to connect with new, darker-skinned neighbors, except possibly as objects of pity and “mission.” They developed a fortress, almost colonial mentality.

Meanwhile, newer suburban congregations arose that offered a more modern approach but remained predominantly white.

How can a 60-year-old Supreme Court decision still be shaping religious life in America? It’s because race still divides us, determining where white parents send their children to school and where housing values are considered stable enough to invest.

Urban schools continue to be racially imbalanced. Neighborhoods show a high degree of racial uniformity. When I drove through Topeka, a public radio show was debating when — when, not whether — Brown v. Board of Education would be overturned and white people could return to their city.

I worked with a downtown church in Indiana, where they had tried to make peace with racial diversity but now were truly excited because “gentrification” had reached their area and prosperous whites were moving back in. Now they had a future.

This appraisal might seem unfair to the many congregations that did adapt to racial diversity and, by now, have lost their attitude of noblesse oblige. But they aren’t the norm, I’m sorry to say.

Meanwhile, black congregations have thrived and new congregations have emerged outside mainline boundaries that embrace African-Americans as treasured friends, not charity cases, and serve Hispanic immigrants with Spanish-language worship and traditions such as Las Posadas, remembering the Holy Family’s search for welcome.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus” and founder of the Church Wellness Project. His website is www.morningwalkmedia.com. Follow Tom on Twitter @tomehrich.)

Copyright 2014 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission.

For NBA teams, Religion Can be Unifying or Divisive

by UrbanFaith Staff | May 7, 2014 | Headline News |

c. 2014 USA Today

(RNS) Long before head coach Doc Rivers found himself defending his Los Angeles Clippers players who were the unwelcome participants in team owner Donald Sterling’s racist comments all week, he was concerned about another sensitive subject: religion.

It was late 1999, the start of Rivers’ first season as coach of the Orlando Magic, and he saw a situation in the locker room that he felt needed to be addressed.

As his players took part in the pregame prayer that was part of their routine, Rivers noticed something he didn’t like.

“I looked up in one of the prayers, and Tariq (Abdul-Wahad) had his arms folded, and you could see that he was really uncomfortable with it,” Rivers said. “So the next game, we were standing up in a circle, and I said, ‘Hey guys, we’re no longer praying.’”

Rivers calls himself a “very religious” man, having grown up in the Second Baptist Church in Maywood, Ill., and praying on his knees every night in his home to this day. But he prefers to practice privately and is quick to note that he has attended church only for funerals the past 15 years.

So, that day, he decided his teams would keep their religious practices private as well.

“We’re no longer praying,” Rivers recalled saying to his team. “I want to take a minute. Everybody close their eyes. We all can have different religions, we have different Gods, we can just take a minute to compose. If you guys want to pray individually, you can do it. If you want to meditate, do whatever you want.

“Then, after that game,Tariq Abdul-Wahad walks in to me, gives me a hug with his eyes tearing, and said: ‘Thank you. That is so important to me. No one has ever respected my (Muslim) religion.’ He said, ‘I’m going to give you everything I’ve got.’”

This NBA season has been unprecedented when it comes to the blending of basketball and unresolved social issues — from Jason Collins becoming the first openly gay athlete to play in a major professional league, to Royce White, who has dealt with mental illness, to the Sterling situation. There has been a widespread push for increased tolerance on all fronts. Yet the conversation about religion and how it’s best handled by coaches and players remains fluid.

With Rivers handling his work world one way and Golden State Warriors coach/ordained minister Mark Jackson another, there’s no better sign of the breadth of this debate than this particular series.

After all, their growing rivalry reached this point in part because of an Oct. 31, 2013, controversy over pregame chapel and the Clippers’ decision to break league tradition and force the Warriors to pray on their own.

Jackson’s strong Christian beliefs and practices are well-chronicled: The former All-Star point guard who found God later in life and has perhaps the most devout locker room in the league sees great value in sharing his spirituality with his players.

This has been the case since the start of his time as coach in 2011. But it was never more obvious than the recent Easter Sunday, when eight of his 15 players made the 18-mile trek from their Beverly Hills hotel, through Los Angeles traffic on the team bus, and to Jackson’s nondenominational church in Van Nuys, Calif., then on to practice at UCLA. A second bus to the practice site had been arranged for those who didn’t want to attend church.

Jackson is hardly alone when it comes to mixing religion and rims. Monty Williams, who coaches Rivers’ son, Austin, has integrated the two in his own way since becoming the New Orleans Pelicans’ coach in 2010. Stars such as the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Kevin Durant, the Houston Rockets’ Dwight Howard and the Warriors’ Stephen Curry are vocal about their beliefs and quick to praise God in interviews with the media.

Every arena in the NBA has a room reserved for pregame chapel in which interested players on both teams can, save for the Clippers’ outlier, take part at the same time. The Thunder even have a pregame invocation at center court of Chesapeake Energy Arena, in which a nondenominational prayer is given, though they are the only team to have such a practice.

According to The New York Times, those delivering the pregame prayer have ranged from Protestants to Roman Catholics to rabbis to Native American spiritual leaders. The report indicated that the Thunder and the NFL’s Carolina Panthers are the only ones among the 141 North American men’s professional teams to do so (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL and MLS).

Mark Jackson also cites Phil Jackson, the legendary coach with the “Zen Master” nickname whose spiritual ways have been lauded by most throughout the years because of his unprecedented success. While his Buddhist beliefs are seen by many as more innocuous than the more-devout style of a Mark Jackson or a Williams, the 68-year-old who grew up with Pentecostal ministers as parents paints a different picture in his latest book, “Eleven Rings.”

Before training camps with the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, Phil Jackson — who said he borrowed this technique from NFL coaching legend Vince Lombardi — would line his players up in a row on the baseline and say: “God has ordained me to coach you young men, and I embrace the role I’ve been given. If you wish to accept the game I embrace and follow my coaching as a sign of your commitment, step across that line.”

Former Lakers small forward Matt Barnes, now with the Clippers, said Phil Jackson’s baseline ritual was no longer in use by the time he played for him in the 2010-11 season that was his last as a coach. But the meditation sessions that were always a part of Jackson’s routine, he said, were still in full effect.

“I think the main thing I took from Phil was just to relax and clear your mind,” said Barnes, who noted that those Lakers would meditate three or four times a month with the lights turned off in the team’s film room. “It was really just to sit back, relax, have good posture and just breathe. Have some incense sometimes. Just silence. Just sit back and breathe, and be in touch with your mind and your soul.

“I think guys bought in because of what (Jackson’s) record showed. But I really don’t think to force anything (is good), whether it’s a religion or a point of view. Like I said, Phil’s thing was never forced.”

Mark Jackson cited the two buses on Easter Sunday as an example of how he always respects others’ beliefs, and he said players who don’t share his world view need not fear for their playing time or worry about their role on his team. But Jackson clearly sees his spirituality as a way to inspire his co-workers and gets excited when he speaks of having a positive influence on others.

Jackson said he has never had a player express concerns. “I am who I am, so I think people make more of it than it is,” he said. “I’m not coach, pastor, husband, father, son — when you see me, you see all. So I don’t separate them. But I’m respectful to everybody.”

As is Rivers, who simply chooses to go with a different style.

“If it’s 75 percent (who believe one way), that’s to me 25 percent that (don’t),” Rivers said. “To me, if it’s 95 percent, the 5 percent deserve the same treatment as everybody else. And I just think that’s what we need to do. If it was church, then that’s different. This is not church. This is our jobs. So our jobs come first, respect comes second, and I think that’s the way it should be.”

Copyright 2014 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission.