Mississippi State University has named South Carolina native Stephen Middleton as the head of African-American studies. The new program will offer separate minor and certificate tracks for students.Middleton said MSU is a fine university with a strong faculty and an active publication record.
“I think this is a tremendous opportunity to become the inaugural director of African-American studies,” Middleton said. “It seemed like a great match for me.”
Middleton, who grew up during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, earned his bachelor’s degree in history from Morris College in 1976. One year later, he completed Ohio State University’s masters program, receiving a degree in black studies, with a concentration in African-American history. In 1987, Middleton received a history doctorate from Miami University. Since earning his doctorate, Middleton has published four books and has attended New York University Law School.
Under Middleton’s leadership, the new African-American studies program aims to significantly impact university students by adding on additional faculty members.
“I hope that the university joins me in desiring to start fast. We need to build on the strengths that we already have,” Middleton said. “We pride ourselves in being an interdisciplinary studies program. There are faculty members now in sociology, history and English who are doing good work pertaining to the African-American experience in a larger context, but we do need to bring additional faculty on board.”
He said he hopes to see the university take on two additional professors specializing in African-American studies by next year.
MSU history department head Alan Marcus said the new program will allow Mississippi State to become a center for African-American studies with the help of Middleton’s leadership skills.
“African-American studies has become a standard program to have at many universities for [more than] two decades,” Marcus said. “What’s interesting is that we have always had courses throughout the university that study various aspects of the African-American experience, but we’ve never had a program for it specifically. Middleton is now putting these classes together in a meaningful way and expanding on them further. We hope that the program increases our knowledge and that we’re able to take it and pass it on through teaching and research.”
The Fugitive Slave Project is one of Middleton’s initiatives, which will help MSU become a repository of information pertaining to African-American history.
This project will recover biographies of African-Americans who ran away from slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries by combing through old historical documents and newspapers.
“Students will be able to handle actual documents from the era,” Middleton said. “I have already received communication from a scholar from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, whose interest was sparked after recently hearing about the project. This is what we want to happen. These are the kinds of people that we would like to have interested in Mississippi State.”
Middleton said he wants to achieve several goals for the new program.
He said one of his aims is to use the new program as a way to reach out to students and members of the community.
“In effort to speak to the students, I plan to meet with student organizations by making contact with the presidents of various student groups,” he said. “I want to let the students know that our program is here, and to let them know what it is about. This is a positive program and we want the students to be involved not only in our courses, but also our outreach with the community.”
Middleton also said he aims to establish a speaker’s bureau in which MSU faculty are available to community groups who want to bring in speakers to discuss topics such as diversity.
“I’d also like to send students out to public schools, for example, to lead conversations with our young people and show them what we’re doing at Mississippi State,” he said.
Another proposed outreach plan involves looking at Mississippi’s rural areas and matching them with federally-funded improvement projects, he said.
“Mississippi is a very rural state,” he said. “Access to the Internet, for example, is one of [many] problems. Within the next two years, we are hoping to get federally sponsored programs matched up with small communities in order to get them connected to the Internet. That’s a service that could benefit all Mississippians.”
Ansel Prichard, a graduate student studying Southern history after reconstruction, said Middleton’s new program will be a valuable asset to the university.
“I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Middleton yet,” he said, “but his ideas for the program sound great. The Fugitive Slave Program would provide an amazing archive to students here at Mississippi State. I’m really interested in seeing how this progresses.”
Middleton said he looks forward to the opportunity of being at the helm of a program that will not only educate students at Mississippi State and help the residents of the local community, but will also help to bring people together by promoting diversity and understanding.
“We live in a global community, and in my experience, if you travel the world, you will find that everyone is talking about the same thing,” Middleton said. “They’re all talking about how to bring people together, how to bring religious groups together, and so forth. This program can be our tool to do that. In the future, I hope students report back and say that they were delighted to have this opportunity because the area beyond the state of Mississippi is not just a single culture, it’s a big world.