Ida Stephens Owens
Owens was one of the first three Black students to enroll in the Duke Graduate School, entering in fall 1962. She went on to run an internationally recognized research lab at the National Institutes of Health and was named the inaugural recipient of The Graduate School's Distinguished Alumni Award.
Documentary of her Duke experience
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James Roland Law
After earning his Ph.D., Law built a long faculty career at Johnson C. Smith University. He also became an avid runner later in life and won six gold medals and set six records in the National Senior Games, earning a spotlight in Sports Illustrated.
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Odell Richardson Reuben
Reuben's family holds a special place in Black history at Duke. In 1962, he became one of the first three African American students to enroll in The Graduate School. The following year, his eldest daughter, Wilhelmina Reuben-Cooke, became one of the first five African American undergraduate students at Duke. Reuben was already a veteran college administrator when he started his Ph.D. He became president of Morris College, an HBCU in South Carolina, at the age of 30 in 1948 and served until his death in 1970.
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Anthony Oyewole
An international student from Nigeria, Oyewole transferred to Duke in 1964 as a junior and graduated in 1965, becoming the first Black person to earn a Duke degree. He began his Ph.D. program at Duke the next year. He has been a professor and head of political science departments at North Carolina Central University; Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria; and Bennett College in Greensboro. He is the co-author of the Historical Dictionary of Nigeria.
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Thomas Carr Graham
Graham is a faculty member at Tuskegee University and is the acting director of the Comparative Medicine Resource Center in the university's College of Veterinary Medicine.
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Freeman Hillyard Ledbetter
After completing his Ph.D. and a postdoc at Duke, Ledbetter changed course and launched a successful career as a designer and builder of environmentally friendly houses. His first project was developing Green Mill in Durham.
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Ned Irving Williams
A native of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Williams came to Duke on a James B. Duke Fellowship in 1970 after graduating cum laude from Howard University. His area of research was chemistry of the nervous system, with a focus on the brain. After completing his Ph.D., Williams took a research position in the Department of Neurology at the Medical University of South Carolina. His life and career were cut short, however, by his early death in 1978.
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Olaogun Oyekola Ogunsola
After completing his Ph.D., Ogunsola served as a lecturer at the University of Lagos in Nigeria. He then had a long career with the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation before becoming executve chairman of Newfoundland Minerals Limited.
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Mario Joaquim Azevedo
A refugee from Mozambique, Azevedo holds not only a Ph.D. in history from Duke, but also an M.P.H. in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has built a career as a novelist, historian, professor, and epidemiologist. He became an associate professor at Jackson State University in 1980 before joining UNC Charlotte in 1986. At UNCC, he became the Frank Porter Graham Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American and African Studies. In 2006, he returned to Jackson State, where he has chaired both the Department of History of Philosophy and the Department of Epidemiology. From 2015-2019, he served as dean of the university's College of Liberal Arts.
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Lelia Louise Vickers
The former Fulbright Scholar went on to a long career as a college faculty member and administrator, with stints at Winston-Salem State University, Livingstone College, North Carolina A&T State University, and Harris-Stowe State University. During her 30-year career at WSSU, she became a professor of education and held several administrative posts, including dean of the education division. She then served as vice president of academic affairs at Livingstone College before joining NC A&T as dean of the School of Education. She later served as dean of the College of Education at HSSU before retiring in 2017.
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S. Dallas Simmons
Over the course of his career, Simmons held a variety of faculty and administrative roles in higher education. After earning his Ph.D. from Duke, he served a four-year stint as president of St. Paul's College. That was followed by a 14-year tenure as president of Virginia Union University, where he was praised for his fiscal management and endowment building. He also served on President Gerald Ford's White House Advance Team. In 2019, he was posthumously inducted into the CIAA Hall of Fame.
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Cleon Franklin Thompson
Before coming to Duke, Thompson had established himself as a faculty member and administrator at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina A&T State University, Tuskegee University, and Shaw University. While at Shaw, he befriended then-Duke president Terry Sanford, who encouraged him to enroll in Duke's education Ph.D. program. After earning his Ph.D., Thompson became interim chancellor at NC A&T before stepping into the chancellorship of Winston-Salem State for 10 years.
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Lillie Mcneill Boyd
Boyd was a faculty member at North Carolina Central University and Shaw University. At Shaw, she was department chair for Natural and Physical Sciences and later served as special assistant to the president for strategic planning, institutional research and effectiveness.
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William Javier Nelson Jr.
Nelson has been a faculty member at Shaw University and Saint Augustine's College in Raleigh. He has also authored several books, including Almost a Territory: America's Attempt to Annex the Dominican Republic.
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George Carlton Wright
Wright has built a long and distinguished career as a scholar of African American history, a faculty member, and an administrator. He was president of Prairie View A&M University for 14 years and is currently the presidential senior advisor and interim vice president for institutional diversity at the University of Kentucky.
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Tommie Morton-Young
Morton-Young has held many positions in government and higher education. She served as a researcher for the U.S. Navy Library and did transliteration in Russian for the Library of Congress. She also taught at Atlanta University, Tennessee State University, the University of Wisconsin, North Carolina State University, North Carolina Central University, and North Carolina A&T State University. She organized African American genealogical and historical societies in North Carolina and Tennessee. While serving as chair of the North Carolina Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, she initiated hearings on pay equity for women and minorities and on school placement of students. She also contributed to a U.S. Department of Labor study on migrant workers.
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Marcellus Chandler Barksdale
Barksdale joined the faculty at Morehouse College, his undergraduate alma mater, in 1977 and went on to a 40-year career there as a professor of African American studies and professor of history. In 2017, he chaired an initiative to mark the school's 150th anniversary through a variety of projects exploring its history.
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Cynthia Anita Griggs Fleming
The first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in history at Duke spent three-plus decades on the faculty at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, establishing herself as a distinguished historian of the civil rights movement and an oral history specialist. During her time at UT, she also chaired and grew the African American studies program.
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Albert Stephen Broussard
A professor of history and a Cornerstone Faculty Fellow at Texas A&M University, Broussard has authored or co-authored numerous books, including Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900-1954; American History: The Early Years to 1877 with Donald A. Ritchie; African American Odyssey: The Stewarts, 1853-1963; and The American Vision. His recent work includes considerations of African American civil rights dialogues in Hawaii.
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Sundar Wilson Fleming
Fleming, who participated in the 1969 Allen Building Takeover as a sophomore before continuing on to earn his Ph.D. at Duke, had a long career as a professor of marketing at North Carolina Central University and served as dean of the business schools at South Carolina State University and NCCU.
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William Melvin Southerland
Southerland is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Howard University. He is the principal investigator of the university's Research Centers in Minority Institutions Program, which focuses on developing Howard's infrastructure for studying diseases that disproportionately affect disadvantaged and minority populations.
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