Who am I?: Memoirs of a transformative Black Studies program

"Who am I?" was the first question students were required to explore in the University of North Carolina-Charlotte's Black Studies Program, created in 1969 after student demands and with student involvement.
This collection of essays shares just how much students in the first decade of the program were influenced by its courses, faculty, social and cultural opportunities or merely its existence. It also reveals the courage, expectations and fears of a too-often overlooked generation of black students. Often first in their families to attend college, their mission was to deliver on the promise of desegregation.
That many achieved and contributed so much is worth celebrating. But not without understanding the care and guidance essential to ensuring their lives mattered.

Vanessa Gallman, a former student of the Black Studies Program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, worked 43 years in newspapering. Her career included: editorial page editor at the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader; national correspondent with Knight-Ridder Newspapers; local government editor at The Washington Post; and reporter for The Charlotte Observer.
A 1976 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill's journalism school, she also held assistant professorships at Florida A&M University and the University of Maryland at College Park. She served as president of the now-Association of Opinion Journalists and has been a member and chair of Pulitzer Prize juries.