Howard

• Battelle, in collaboration with several national labs, announced today a new partnership with Howard University to promote STEM career and research opportunities for faculty and students.
• Battelle is a non-profit research and development organization that has a management role at eight Department of Energy national laboratories.
• Many of the labs, namely Brookhaven National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory where Battelle has a management role have individual longstanding relationships led by the Office of Research at Howard University.
• This initiative will allow for collaboration and increased visibility into opportunities at Battelle as well as each of the national labs.

• Whole Foods Market, the nation's leading retailer of natural and organic foods, will anchor a 7.4-acre, new retail center and serve as a catalyst for the expansion of Downtown Summerlin.
• "Whole Foods Market is known for its standards of excellence and being an industry leader when it comes to natural and organic foods, and we believe it is an ideal addition to the Summerlin community," said Frank Stephan, President of the Nevada Region for Howard Hughes.
• Downtown Summerlin welcomes the fourth Whole Foods Market location within the Howard Hughes portfolio—following openings in Downtown Columbia® in Maryland (2014), The Woodlands® in Texas (2015), and Ward Village® in Honolulu, Hawai'i (2018).
• Downtown Summerlin has entered a new chapter of dynamic growth, with additional office, inline retail, and multifamily housing options planned for the new retail center to be anchored by Whole Foods Market.

• In a 2019 article, The New York Times tried to find the origins of the use of the term for Howard when U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, one of the school’s most well-known alumnae, was still a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.
• It seemed intriguing to me as a longtime admirer of Malcolm X – and also as one who made the pilgrimage to the original Mecca in Saudi Arabia, as Malcolm famously did in 1964.
• Still, as a veteran education writer with an extensive history of covering historically Black colleges and universities – including Howard – I decided to dig deeper.

A new era

• This was – contrary to what The New York Times said about the term emerging after the death of Malcolm X in 1965 – nearly 15 years before he was even born.
• My finding comes at a time when Howard, located in Washington, D.C., is entering a new era.
• R-1 is a classification level reserved for universities that grant doctoral degrees and also have “very high research activity.”

Going way back

• Its founders envisioned Howard as a school for educating and training Black physicians, teachers and ministers from the nearly 4 million newly freed slaves.
• There, I did a simple search for the term “Mecca” and got more than 400 results, including the one from 1909.

The meaning of ‘The Mecca’

• It is most often meant to preserve Howard’s reputation as a beacon of Black thought.
• That first reference from February 1909 came in an article written by J.A.
• Mitchell, a student who referred to Howard as a potential Mecca for young Black students.
• A few years later, in a 1913 edition of the Howard University Journal, an article stated:
  “Howard is a strategic institution.

A different Mecca?

• Anyone familiar with the culture at Howard knows there’s a long-standing rivalry between Howard University and Hampton University, located in Hampton, Virginia, over which school is ‶the real HU.” My research shows there might have once been a debate over which school is “The Mecca” as well.
• When Booker T. Washington arrived at Hampton in 1872 – five years after Howard University was founded in 1867 – Hampton, Virginia, was known as the “Mecca of the ambitious colored youth of the dismantled South,” according to a 1910 Howard manuscript titled “A Ride with Booker T. Washington.” Hampton isn’t the only U.S. city to be known as a Black Mecca.
• As noted in a 1925 edition of “The Crisis” – the NAACP magazine founded in 1910 by W.E.B.
• DuBois – Washington, D.C., was “regarded as the Mecca of the American Negro, for here he is under the wing of the eagle and can’t be made the victim of hostile legislation or rules.” Around the same time, Alain Locke, who taught English and philosophy at Howard in the early 1910s and started the school’s philosophy department, proclaimed Harlem as the “Mecca of the new Negro.” Locke is also known as the “dean of the Harlem Renaissance.” The point is this idea of a Black Mecca was constantly shifting and continues to shift to this day.

The Mecca of the future

• Despite archival records that show Howard was called The Mecca as early as 1909, other details have yet to be discovered.
• Perhaps under the leadership of President Vinson, a champion of digital scholarship, Howard students and scholars can continue to research how Howard came to be known as The Mecca.

• The program's partner in Ukraine is the international R&D agricultural company Corteva Agriscience, that provides access to advanced genetics of Pioneer® seeds.
• The Howard G. Buffett Foundation and Corteva Agriscience focus their efforts on addressing this global problem, including supporting Ukrainian farmers with seeds in extremely resource-constrained field conditions.
• To apply for participation, farmers should contact the Corteva Agriscience sales representative in their region .
• "Corteva Agriscience has been working side by side with Ukrainian farmers for many years, knows the challenges they face, and works to assist them in overcoming those challenges.