HANESBRANDS ANNOUNCES $2 MILLION INVESTMENT IN HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

HanesBrands, a global leader in iconic apparel brands, today announced a $2 million investment in three historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The four-year partnership involves North Carolina A&T, Pensole Lewis College of Business & Design and Winston-Salem State University.

The university partnerships will fund research and offer financial support to students in areas ranging from sustainability to fashion design to supply chain management. The investment will build on HanesBrands’ commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, providing opportunities for underrepresented minorities and building pipelines of diverse talent.

“Inclusion is at the core of who we are as a company, and we are committed to creating opportunity for all,” said Steve Bratspies, CEO of HanesBrands. “Our partnerships with these HBCUs are part of HanesBrands’ legacy of investing in our communities. The scholarships and internships that are part of this program will ensure that students have opportunities to acquire the education and experience necessary to succeed and will help build a diverse and inclusive workforce.”

HanesBrands will engage students at the universities who are studying Information Technology, Data Analytics, Supply Chain Management, Finance, Marketing, Fashion Design and Merchandising. The partnership includes scholarships, internships, mentorships and research grants.

“We’re proud to partner with HanesBrands, not only in student support but on industry-relevant research,” said Chancellor Harold L. Martin, Sr. of North Carolina A&T State University. “This partnership will give students industry and research experience that will lead to rewarding careers of impact after graduation, as well as growing a stronger workforce for HanesBrands and North Carolina more broadly.”

“Our students recognize HanesBrands as a company that offers meaningful careers and is making a positive difference in our hometown of Winston-Salem,” said Chancellor Elwood L. Robinson of Winston-Salem State University. “This partnership will bring learning opportunities directly to our campus. Having real-world industry experience and building corporate networks will be invaluable to our students as they prepare for careers in everything from finance to fashion design to supply chain.”

"We are humbled and honored that HanesBrands shares our same vision to not only see but also take the necessary steps needed to create a more diverse industry,” said D’Wayne Edwards, President of Pensole Lewis College of Business & Design. “The work we will co-create together will inspire, change lives and leave our industry better than when we entered it. Thank you to HanesBrands for believing in us and inviting us to be on this journey with you."

The company will be a strategic partner of the HanesBrands Apparel Studio at Pensole Lewis College of Business & Design. The college, located in Detroit, is set to open in 2022. The company will donate materials, including fabrics and blank finished goods, as well as a variety of equipment to help teach students design.

HanesBrands has a longstanding commitment to providing educational assistance and support to expand access and opportunities to underserved communities. In 2020, the company established a two-year, $50,000 annual financial commitment in partnership with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) to provide scholarships to freshman students attending HBCUs. Since 1981, HanesBrands has been a corporate partner to Carver High School in Winston-Salem, NC and since 2015, the Urban Dove Team Charter School in Brooklyn, NY.

These new investments support HanesBrands’ commitment to improve the lives of at least 10 million people by 2030 through diversity and inclusion initiatives, health and wellness programs, improved workplace quality, and philanthropic efforts that improve local communities.

HanesBrands strives to make its workplace more diverse and inclusive and provide equal opportunities for associates to reach their full potential. To learn more about HanesBrands’ commitment to people and 2030 goals, visit HBISustains.com.

North Carolina A&T to leave MEAC

HBCU football powerhouse North Carolina A&T announced Friday it will move to the Big South Conference in 2021, a major blow to the shrinking Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference.

The Greensboro university, which announced the move during an on-campus news conference, will join the Big South on July 1, 2021 as the conference's 12th full-time member. It will have the largest enrollment in the conference and return football to eight teams (Presbyterian is departing this year), including three associate members.

N.C. A&T teams will be immediately eligible for Big South titles upon entry to the conference.

"We have been looking carefully at our opportunities in athletics for five years and more intensively over the past year," North Carolina A&T chancellor Harold L. Martin Sr. said in a statement. "We're pleased to have brought that process to fruition and excited to be ushering in a new alliance with the Big South. This move makes great sense for our student-athletes, for our fans and for our bottom line. We will always have a place in our hearts for the MEAC, and we look forward to what the new conference will make possible for the Aggies."

The most significant ramifications are in football. N.C. A&T has developed into the leading power among HBCU football programs (historically black colleges and universities). It has won at least a share of three straight and five of the past six MEAC titles and four of the first five Celebration Bowls, which match the MEAC and Southwestern Athletic Conference champs, and generally decide the Division I black college football national title. The Aggies have gone 72-21 over eight straight winning seasons, including a 12-0 record in 2017.

[SOURCE: ESPN]

HBCU Graduate Walter Hood Receives MacArthur 'Genius' Grant

HBCU (North Carolina A&T) graduate Walter Hood is a 2019 recipient of a MacArthur 'Genius' Grant".

The MacArthur Fellowship is a $625,000, no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. They may use their fellowship to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers.

Walter Hood is a landscape and public artist creating urban spaces that resonate with and enrich the lives of current residents while also honoring communal histories. Hood melds architectural and fine arts expertise with a commitment to designing ecologically sustainable public spaces that empower marginalized communities. Over his career, he has transformed traffic islands, vacant lots, and freeway underpasses into spaces that challenge the legacy of neglect of urban neighborhoods.

Through engagement with community members, he teases out the natural and social histories as well as current residents’ shared patterns and practices of use and aspirations for a place. He designed Lafayette Square Park (1999) in Oakland to serve its diverse users: children play on a grassy artificial hill that references the former domed observatory on the spot, and walkways, game tables, and a performance space serve nearby residents and the homeless who have frequented the park since the Great Depression. With Splash Pad Park (2003), also in Oakland, Hood created an oasis among busy roadways that provides pedestrian access between neighborhoods; it is now home to the city’s largest farmer’s market. Hood’s designs for institutional settings, such as the gardens of the M. H. de Young Museum in Golden State Park (2005) and the walkways of the Broad Museum in Los Angeles (2015), demonstrate his ability to interweave erudite, elegantly crafted spatial and material configurations into the context of local geography and ecology.

More recently, Hood has undertaken ambitious commemorative landscapes that reflect his interest in the role of sculpture in public space. His plans for Nauck Town Square in Arlington County, Virginia (2016–present), located in a neighborhood whose residents are descendants of a pre-Emancipation community of freed blacks, include a towering sculpture that spells “Freed” made from replica slave badges. For the landscape surrounding the forthcoming International African American Museum (2020), to be built on the site where nearly 40 percent of enslaved Africans arrived in this country, Hood has designed a memorial garden filled with native grasses and featuring a tidal pool whose waters will recede at regular intervals to reveal an engraved pattern of life-sized figures, aligned as though confined within the hold of a slave ship. Hood is broadening the myriad ways in which a place can be transformed by intervention in the landscape and imbuing social justice and equity into public spaces that make past and present community lifeways visible.

BIOGRAPHY

Walter Hood received a BLA (1981) from North Carolina A&T State University, an MLA and MArch (1989) from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA (2013) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the creative director and founder of Hood Design Studio and is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning and Urban Design in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. Additional works by Hood include Witness Walls (2018) in Nashville, Solar Strand (2012) at the University of Buffalo, Jackson Sculpture Terrace (2012) in Jackson, Wyoming, and Powell Street Promenade (2012) in San Francisco, among other projects. He has also published two monographs, Urban Diaries (1997) and Blues & Jazz Landscape Improvisations (1993), and is the editor of the forthcoming Black Landscapes Matter.

Inaugural HBCU Baseball World Series: Southern University vs. North Carolina A&T

In its inaugural year, the Historically Black College and University World Series is a matchup featuring Southern University and North Carolina A&T University, as they meet on the baseball diamond in an interconference matchup that will crown a HBCU baseball champion. The HBCU World Series will take place on Friday, May 24, 2019. The game allows both the Jaguars and Aggies to write the first chapter in a legendary match up between the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) and the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) in the HBCU baseball showdown between the interconference foes.

This event is organized by BCSG 360, which is a global advocate of the Historically Black College and University (HBCU) experience and supported by the Chicago public and private communities. Technical assistance in the development of the tournament has been provided by Black College Nines, which is an organization that supports the legacy of black college baseball.

This one game winner-take-all is for more than bragging rights. It is special to the HBCU community, the student-athletes, coaches and the thousands of fans expected in attendance. This game will crown a much needed national champion of black college baseball while showcasing its participation in the NCAA Division I, the official governing body of both MEAC and SWAC conferences.

The significance of the HBCU World Series between Southern and North Carolina A&T is its relationship to Black College Nines (BCN), a nationally recognized website of current and historical HBCU baseball news which tries to preserve the legacy of historically black college and university baseball. The participants in this year’s world series are those two top ranked teams it the BCN “large school” poll. The poll’s voting committee is made up of an informed and impartial group of individuals who follow college baseball on all levels, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) baseball. Included in the group are college athletic administrators and educators, college baseball writers and other sports journalists and broadcasters, former HBCU and other college ballplayers and above all else… college baseball enthusiasts who have an interest in promoting HBCU baseball.

Black College Nines’ HBCU Baseball Top 10 Polls include one for the “large school” division composed of 19 HBCU schools representing NCAA Division I and one for the “small school” division made up of the 30 HBCU schools with NCAA Division II, NAIA and independent status.

In the latest May 7, 2019, Black College Nines HBCU Baseball Top 10 Poll in the large school division, Southern sits as the No. 1 ranked team followed by North Carolina A&T at No. 2. The crowning of Black College Nines National Champions will be announced on Tuesday, May 21st, 2019 on the Black College Nines’ website, Twitter and Facebook pages.

Last season, Southern University baseball was a train wreck in the SWAC conference. In head coach Kerrick Jackson’s first year, before the start of the 2019 season, a majority of collegiate baseball publishers declared the Jaguars would finish last in the SWAC Western division.

Nearly a year later, the Jaguars got a resume building win defeating the nation’s No. 8th ranked LSU Tigers this past April 9th by the score of 7-2. Southern then captured the program’s first SWAC Western Division title since 2012 and will enter the 2019 SWAC Baseball Tournament as the #1 seed in New Orleans adding to an extraordinary turnaround from a 9-33 team from a year ago. And they sit atop Black College Nines Top 10 Poll looking for the program’s first HBCU Baseball national title.

North Carolina A&T is looking towards winning their second straight Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) Southern Division title and earning the No. 1 seed out of the Southern Division at the MEAC Baseball Tournament. The No. 1 seed out of the south will receive a bye at the 2019 MEAC Baseball Championship Tournament, May 15-18, in Daytona Beach, Florida. The Aggies (26-21 overall and 14-7 in the MEAC) are ranked No. 2 in the latest BCN Top 10 Poll.

Both head coaches agree on the importance of the baseball championship event which will be played at the home of the Chicago White Sox.

NC A&T head coach Ben Hall said, “we’re just honored to have been chosen, love the concept and where we are going with the opportunity to play in the game. When you look across the country and in the SWAC and MEAC, in our division level and even at the Division II level, the programs in HBCU baseball continue to work and push to get themselves to the top. It kind of gives you an exciting opportunity to test yourself against a nearer school or an nearer program whose on the up and up. So I’m just excited about the trip, excited for the opportunity to play Southern and take our team up there and compete with coach Kerrick and his guys.”

Kerrick Jackson Southern head coach on playing the Aggies in Chicago said, “we’re excited about the opportunity of the event to move forward and have a chance to do really, really good. Obviously, it would hold a little more weight if NC A&T wins their tournament, we win our tournament and you are able to truly crown a true HBCU World Series champion. But I think with this being the first year of the tournament, I think its an excellent opportunity to kind of get us out there and build on it for the future.”

BCSG 360 Exective Director Erwin Prentiss Hill worked with Black College Nines in getting the information together and working with both the NCAA and NAIA, who in our opinion were very helpful in providing the regulations, the bylaws and answers needed allowing this and future events for HBCU baseball to host a much needed national baseball championship for HBCU baseball programs. It is an opportunity to play for something more meaningful outside of just competing for a conference championship. We heard the cry of many head coaches over the last ten years. Thanks to Prentiss Hill for all of his dedication and to Black College Nines.

Who: North Carolina A&T University Baseball Team, Greensboro, NC,

Southern University Baseball Team, Baton Rouge, LA

What: Inaugural HBCU World Series – NCAA College Baseball Event

When: May 24, 2019

1:00 p.m. (start time subject to change)

Where: Guaranteed Rate Field

333 W. 35th Street

Chicago, IL 60616

Tickets can be purchased at 360 HWS Game Ticket 2019

Alcorn State and North Carolina A&T to meet in Celebration Bowl to decide HBCU Champion!

The Alcorn State Braves (9-3) defeated the Southern Jaguars on the SWAC Championship Game to advance to the Celebration Bowl to face MEAC champion North Carolina A&T (9-2) for the HBCU national championship. The game will take place Saturday, Dec. 15, at noon ET from Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta and aired live on ABC.

Entering its fourth year, the Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl has established itself as a premier bowl game and celebrates the heritage, legacy, pageantry, and tradition of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). It is a championship-style game between the MEAC and SWAC champions. ESPN Events collaborates with 100 Black Men of Atlanta to organize the game’s ancillary events which include a youth symposium, robotics showcase, gospel night, fan experience and more. The MEAC leads the overall Celebration Bowl series 2-1 after three years. North Carolina A&T defeated Alcorn State 41-34 in the inaugural game in 2015. In 2016, Grambling State defeated North Carolina Central 10-9. As in previous years, last year’s Celebration Bowl was a tight battle with North Carolina A&T beating Grambling State 21-14.

Fans can purchase tickets to the Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl online at thecelebrationbowl.com or ticketmaster.com, or by calling Ticketmaster at 1-800-745-3000. Prices range from $15 to $155 including taxes and fees. A full list of events surrounding the game are available on the event’s website.

The North Carolina A&T Aggies are the 2017 HBCU Football Champs!

The North Carolina A&T Aggies (12-0) are once again HBCU football champions after defeating the Grambling University Tigers (11-2) by a score of 21-14 at the third annual Celebration Bowl.

The Aggies were lead by QB Lamar Raynard, who completed 23 of 43 passes for 225 yards and a touchdown and had 17 yards on eight carries.

"It's a great feeling to make history," the junior quarterback said.

Running back Marquell Cartwright aided the team's effort by rushing for 110 yards on 20 carries.

Franklin McCain III made the defensive play of the day for the Aggies. The freshman cornerback ended a Grambling drive following the second-half kickoff with an interception at the goal line.

"It's awesome," said McCain. "Not many programs can say that they went 12-0 and won a national championship. It's unbelievable."

"It's an awesome feeling to be 12-0 right now," N.C. A&T coach Rod Broadway said. "I'm just extremely proud of our players, and I'm happy for our school."

The Celebration Bowl has the winner of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) face the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC ) champion to decide who is the best in HBCU football.

This is North Carolina A&T's fourth championship. They also won pre-Celebration Bowl championships in 1990 and 1999 before winning the inaugural Celebration Bowl in 2015.

Obama discusses discrimination, social change with students at North Carolina A&T University

In conjunction with ESPN's Undefeated, President Barack Obama held a town hall event at North Carolina A&T. He told the students, most of whom were athletes that social movements and activist activity is more likely to be successful if they know exactly what they are working for. Obama also discussed funding for HBCUs and how students could help with that funding. Check out some highlights of President Obama's responses below:

President Obama discusses how social movements begin with one person and then moves forward to deal with the bigger picture.

President Obama discussing funding for HBCU's and lowering cost for students:

HBCUs to be dropped from low-tuition proposal at UNC campuses

Historically black universities will be dropped from a legislative plan to slash tuition to $500 a semester, said Republican Sen. Tom Apodaca, the sponsor of a bill that would have affected several UNC (University North Carolina) campuses.

His comment came as opposition mounted to the low-tuition plan. Several hundred alumni rallied outside the legislature Wednesday, saying the legislation threatens the economic viability of three black campuses: Elizabeth City State, Fayetteville State and Winston-Salem State universities. The protesters expressed skepticism about the bill’s language that promised that the state would cover lost tuition revenue up to $70 million in 2018-19.

Apodaca, a Hendersonville Republican, said he would put forth an amendment that would remove the three historically black campuses but keep UNC Pembroke and Western Carolina in the tuition-reduction proposal. Asked whether the outcry on behalf of historically black colleges and universities was behind his decision, Apodaca said, “If you can’t give away $70 million, then I’m not going to try to.”

Read more here: HBCUs to be dropped from low-tuition proposal at UNC campuses, sponsor says

North Carolina A&T wins inaugural Celebration Bowl

North Carolina A&T came out on top of Alcorn State in the inaugural Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl. In the battle of HBCUs between the SWAC and the MEAC champs, MEAC champ North Carolina A&T outlasted Alcorn State 41-34.

The Aggies were led by running back Tarik Cohen who rushed for for 285 yards and three touchdowns.

The Aggies finished the season 10-2 and are now HBCU national championship. Congrats to the North Carolina A&T Aggies!

HBCU football teams to make history in inaugural Celebration Bowl

Two HBCU football teams will make history in the inaugural Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl which will pit the SWAC champion, Alcorn State (9-3) against the MEAC champion, North Carolina A&T Aggies (9-2). The winner will be the ultimate HBCU champion! The game will be played at the Georgia Dome on December 19th and will air on ABC at noon Eastern Time.

December 19th marks the ultimate face-off in HBCU HISTORY! Get your tix for the Air Force Reserve #CelebrationBowl today...

Posted by Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl on Tuesday, December 8, 2015