HBCUstory Part 2 on Living Your Best Life with Genma Holmes

Join Living Your Best Life with Genma Holmes as we profile organizations and leaders who lead by example. With extraordinary acts of kindness and charitable giving that help countless lives daily, these organizations and leaders embody "Be the change you want to see in the world".

Throughout 2013 listeners will hear from presidents of organizations who are global change agents. We will also hear from CEOs of social enterprise businesses who are changing communities and college educators who are taking their students out of the classroom and into surrounding neighborhoods to learn and serve others.

 On Saturday, April 6, 2013 we will continue the dialogue with Dr. Crystal deGregory, founding editor of HBCUstory. Listen as the lively discussion from last week pick up where we left off. Updates on presenters, along with perspectives on open and closed campuses, the telling of the HBCUstory in places other than HBCU zoned areas of the community, and navigating the politics of higher education will be shared.

Hear why the HBCUstory Symposium will be an opportunity for young professors and doctoral candidates to gain value exposure for presenting their publications and a reminder for young academia to not become complacent in their careers as educators and mentors to the next generation.

Dr. deGregory will also share more insights from her dissertation: Raising a Nonviolent Army: Four Nashville Black Colleges and the Century Long Struggle for Civil Rights, 1830s-1930s, Vanderbilt University 2011.

Online registration can be found at HBCUstory Symposium.

Living Your Best Life, a radio show that empowers, inspires and motivates one to live their BEST life, can heard on 760 AM in the Middle-Tennessee Region, military bases, and streamed live on U-Stream.TV from 9-10AM CST. This show will also be aired on WTST, a member of the HBCU radio network.

More About HBCUstory 

Founded in 2012, HBCUstory, Inc. is a nonprofit advocacy initiative,  preserving, presenting and promoting inspiring stories of the Historically Black College and University (HBCU) community’s past and present, for our future.

Each and everyday, the HBCU community is writing the HBCUstory. We have fond memories of administrators, faculty, staff and fellow alumni–of people who believed in us and made us believe in ourselves.

We who believe in the mission and vision of HBCUs must leverage our HBCU stories as more than mere memories. They serve as compelling evidence for the future of these’s educational, cultural and social treasures.

At HBCUstory, we’re making memories matter.

HBCUstory Keynote Speaker Michael Sorrell, President of Paul Quinn College

Micheal J. Sorrell is the 34th president of Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Texas and is the reigning “HBCU Male President of the Year.” Under his trans-formative leadership, Paul Quinn demolished fifteen abandoned buildings, achieved full accreditation with the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS) and partnered with PepsiCo to transform its football field into the two-acre “WE Over Me Farm.” As Paul Quinn’s president, Sorrell is masterfully branding the college’s dynamic “Quinnite Nation,” which is experiencing one of the greatest turnarounds in the history of higher education.

More About HBCUstory's  Founding Editor, Crystal deGregory, Ph.d 

A native of Freeport, Bahamas, Dr. Crystal A. deGregory received her doctoral degree in history from Vanderbilt University in May 2011. Entitled "Raising a Nonviolent Army: Four Nashville Black Colleges and the Century-Long Struggle for Civil Rights, 1830s-1930s," her dissertation focuses on the role of American Baptist College, Fisk University, Meharry Medical College and Tennessee State University and their students in the struggle for equality, justice and civil rights in Nashville, Tennessee.

Crystal received her undergraduate training at the historic Fisk University. A proud Fiskite, the school's small but mighty faculty nurtured her love of history as both a passion and profession. In May 2005, she was awarded a master's degree from Vanderbilt for her thesis "The Color Divide in the Emergent Black Man's Party: The Political Strivings of the Bahamian Colored and Black Middle Class in the Progressive Liberal Party, 1953-1963."

A former fellow of the National Visionary Heritage Fellows Program of the National Visionary Leadership Project, her research on Drs. McDonald and Jamye Coleman Williams was included in the 2004 monograph, A Wealth of Wisdom: Legendary African American Elders Speak. In addition to being among the inaugural fellows of Vanderbilt's Center for Nashville Studies (in conjunction with Vanderbilt's College of Arts and Sciences), Crystal was the recipient of the Bahamas Government Graduate Scholarship and Lyford Cay Graduate Student awards. In 2010, she also won the alternate award for the TIAA-CREF Ruth Simms Hamilton Research Fellowship.

Crystal believes deeply in the unique mission of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and to this end, proudly serves on the faculty of Tennessee State University's department of history, geography and political science. A regular contributor to HBCU Digest, she is also the founder and executive editor of HBCUstory.com, an online advocacy center presenting inspiring stories of the HBCU community's past and present, for our future.

Her work has been published in Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture (2011), Tennessee Historical Quarterly (2010), Freedom Facts and Firsts: 400 Years of the African American Civil Rights Experience (2009), National African American Biography (2008), Notable Black American Men II (2007), and Encyclopedia of African American Business (2006). She has forthcoming works in The Tennessee State University Journal and in A Single Garment of Destiny: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Globalization of an Ethical Ideal, Lewis V. Baldwin and Paul Dekar, editors; she will also serve as editor for Emancipation and the Fight for Freedom, the sixth volume in the 12-part series, Tennessee in the Civil War: The Best of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly.

Photo credits: Genma Holmes, Paul Quinn College, and HBCUstory