Amilcar Shabazz
Professor and Undergraduate Program Director, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies | University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst, MA, UNITED STATES
Amilcar Shabazz has been a prominent voice in the movement to make reparations to descendants of former enslaved Americans.
Expertise (6)
Reparations for Slavery
Juneteenth
African American Educational History and Public Policy
Afro-Americans in the Caribbean, Central and South America
African American Biography
Reparations
Biography
Amilcar Shabazz has been a prominent voice in the movement to make reparations to descendants of former enslaved Americans. As a scholar, his work focuses on the political economy of social and cultural movements, education, and public policy.
His book Advancing Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas was the winner of the T.R. Fehrenbach Book Award and other scholarly recognitions.
He was also a major proponent behind making Juneteenth a state holiday in Massachusetts.
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Education (3)
University of Houston: Ph.D., History
Lamar University: M.A., History
The University of Texas at Austin: B.A., Economics
Links (3)
Select Recent Media Coverage (7)
Holiday hopes, changing traditions — People share what means the most this holiday season and for 2024
CBS News online
2023-12-24
Amilcar Shabazz, professor of history and Africana studies in the W.E.B. Department of Afro-American Studies, is among those commenting on how they are observing the holiday season and what holidays mean to them. “It's a time to really sift through all of that and look for the truth, look for the truth of our reality, the truth of the problems that beset us,” Shabazz says.
Slavery reparations in Amherst Massachusetts could include funding for youth programs and housing
AP online
2023-10-16
“The recommendations we’ve made will begin to make this space one that is more inviting, welcoming and hospitable for people of African descent,” said Amilcar Shabazz, a professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, who has written a book on reparations and is a member of the assembly. “I believe this project that we have embarked upon will contribute to the national momentum toward Black reparations, the kind of reparations that will meaningfully change the status of African Americans in this country,” Shabazz said.
Who should be eligible for reparations? That's the big question in Amherst
GBH tv
2023-08-07
Amilcar Shabazz, University of Massachusetts Amherst professor within the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, is another member of the city’s reparations panel and the architect of the eligibility framework the group is considering. “It’s a sticky discourse,” said Shabazz, who described his approach to reparative justice as an “expansive,” concentric circle-like framework that would prioritize the descendants of those enslaved in the U.S.
Activists split over whether reparations should go to Black immigrants
The Washington Post print
2023-07-20
Amilcar Shabazz, professor of history and Africana Studies in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, is quoted in an article on the quest for reparations in Amherst and elsewhere.“One of the things that actually unites all African people is the right to reparation, because we were all damaged by this transatlantic slave trade and this experience of slavery,” Shabazz says.
How W.E.B. Du Bois legacy continues to live on in his birthplace of western Massachusetts
WWLP online
2023-02-27
“Dr. DuBois was a genius, he’s someone that many of us in the academy can aspire to want to emulate, said Dr. Amilcar Shabazz. “He was truly what we call a scholar-activist and by that I mean he saw problems in the world, injustices in the world and put so much of his gifts into trying to solve those problems.”
Black American Heritage flag-raising ceremony in Springfield
WWLP online
2023-02-01
Dr. Amilcar Shabazz, a distinguished UMass Professor of Afro-American Studies, was named this year’s honoree. He was acutely aware of the simultaneous struggle and celebration of Black History Month. “Slavery projected people of African descent as less than human beings and therefore not part of human history. So with Juneteenth and the end of shadow slavery, we have started a march of restoring the dignity of human beings of African descent,” said Shabazz.
Righting past wrongs
Valley Advocate online
2021-07-01
“Just 17 years before I was born, my family were victims of a race riot,” said Shabazz, an Amherst resident and a professor of history and Africana studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The riot in Shabazz’s hometown of Beaumont was on a scale of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Shabazz said. The Tulsa Race Massacre occurred in 1921, when a white mob descended on the Black section of the Oklahoma city and burned more than 1,000 homes and destroyed a thriving business district known as “Black Wall Street.”
Select Publications (1)
Advancing Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas
Book – The University of North Carolina PressAmilcar Shabazz
2004-01-15
As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), it is important to consider the historical struggles that led to this groundbreaking decision. Four years earlier in Texas, the Sweatt v. Painter decision allowed blacks access to the University of Texas's law school for the first time. Amilcar Shabazz shows that the development of black higher education in Texas--which has historically had one of the largest state college and university systems in the South--played a pivotal role in the challenge to Jim Crow education.
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