Brookings Institution Announces Dr. Cecilia Rouse as President

The Brookings Institution announced that Cecilia Rouse has been named its next president, following approval by its Board of Trustees. Rouse’s appointment will be effective in January 2024, when she will succeed Amy Liu, who has served as interim president since July 2022 and will remain in this role until January.

Rouse will join Brookings from Princeton University, where she is the Katzman-Ernst Professor in Economics and Education. Rouse served in the White House as the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2021 to 2023 and was the first Black economist to hold this position in the Council’s 77-year history. Previously, Rouse served as the Dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. She also served as a Member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2011 and worked as a Special Assistant to the President from 1998 to 1999.

“We are delighted that Dr. Rouse will join the Brookings Institution as its ninth president since its founding in 1916. Dr. Rouse has demonstrated an exceptional commitment to public policy and education through her many years of dedicated public service and rigorous scholarship,” said Glenn Hutchins and Suzanne Nora Johnson, co-chairs of the Brookings Board of Trustees. “She is the right leader for Brookings. Her leadership and managerial experiences have always shown a commitment to rigor, balance and inclusivity, which are hallmarks of Brookings’s research and values. We would also especially like to thank Amy Liu for serving as our interim president this past year to ensure the continued excellence of Brookings’s work.”

“Dr. Rouse joins Brookings as the ideal president for Brookings at this dynamic moment, after a thorough and comprehensive search by the Board of Trustees. Brookings’s research and evidence-based analyses are critical to solving domestic and global challenges and shaping better policy outcomes for all,” said Kenneth M. Jacobs, co-chair of the Board Search Committee.

“Cecilia is that rare triple threat: an outstanding scholar, a strong institutional leader, and a policy adviser at the highest levels,” said Ben Bernanke, Brookings distinguished senior fellow and former Federal Reserve Chair. “Those strengths make her a great fit for Brookings."

Based in Washington, D.C., and reporting to the Board of Trustees, Rouse will oversee all aspects of Brookings to ensure its unwavering ability to produce the highest-quality research and policy recommendations.

“I am thrilled to be joining the Brookings Institution as its next president,” said Dr. Rouse. “Brookings has for more than a century been central to global policy leadership and is world-renowned for the quality of its experts and research. A free exchange of ideas among a diversity of thought is foundational to strong research. We live in an era of profound challenges, from the climate crisis and societal polarization, to economic insecurity, to the unknown bounds of our technology. Brookings will continue to ask the best questions and seek answers that work.”

The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization whose mission is to provide in-depth, nonpartisan research to improve policy and governance at local, national, and global levels.

At the core of Brookings’s mission is the quality, independence, and impact of its research. Brookings is dedicated to finding bold, pragmatic solutions for today’s challenges through open-minded inquiry, supporting diverse perspectives, and holding itself to the highest standards of scholastic rigor. Because of this, Brookings has been at the forefront of public policy for more than a century.

MLB TO STAGE NEGRO LEAGUES TRIBUTE GAME AT RICKWOOD FIELD NEXT JUNE HONORING WILLIE MAYS

Major League Baseball will stage a Negro Leagues tribute game at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, on June 20, 2024, between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals.

The 10,800-seat stadium, opened in 1910, is the oldest professional ballpark in the U.S. and a National Historic Site. The stadium was home to the Birmingham Black Barons from 1924-60.

“It’s an honor. Any time I get to represent my culture like that, especially on the MLB level, it’s always a joy,” said Cardinals rookie Jordan Walker, who is Black. “All I got to do is stay healthy and ready and I want to play in that game, for sure.”

The game will honor Hall of Famer Willie Mays, an Alabama native who began his professional career with the team in 1948.

“Willie played there, oldest ballpark in the nation,” Giants manager Gabe Kapler said. “Really incredible opportunity for our organization. Really excited about it.”

MLB said Tuesday it is staging the game around the Juneteenth holiday, which commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in Texas in 1865. There also will be a Double-A game at the ballpark between the Birmingham Barons and Montgomery Biscuits of the Southern League on June 18.

St. Louis will be the home team for the June 20 game, scheduled to start shortly after 7 p.m. EDT and to be televised nationally on Fox. Period uniforms will be used relating to the Negro Leagues history of San Francisco and St. Louis.

“The legacy of the Negro Leagues and its greatest living player, Willie Mays, is one of excellence and perseverance,” baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement. “We look forward to sharing the stories of the Negro Leagues throughout this event next year.”

MLB will work with the City of Birmingham and Friends of Rickwood to renovate the ballpark, the home of the minor league Barons from 1910-1961, 1964-65, 1981-87. The Barons have played since 2013 at Regions Field, about 3 miles away, and shift one game annually to Rickwood in a tribute to the team’s history.

[SOURCE: DALLASPOSTTRIBUNE]

TV reporter takes off wig, reveals locs on Juneteenth, her 'natural hair liberation day'

Akilah Davis, a local news anchor chose Juneteenth to share her journey to hair freedom and to unveil her locs because she wants to be true to herself on the job. She hopes to inspire women and little girls struggling to embrace their roots. It's hair freedom she's always wanted.

$3.8M in Action Fund Grants Help Protect 40 African American Historic Sites

Morgan School Charlotte North Carolina

Grants from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund advance ongoing preservation activities for historic places such as homes, museums, and landscapes that represent African American cultural heritage. To date, the program has supported 242 historic African American places and invested more than $20 million to help preserve significant sites imbued with Black life, humanity, and cultural heritage.

With amounts ranging from $50,000 to $155,000, these Action Fund grants support preservation work in four primary areas: Capital Projects, Organizational Capacity Building, Project Planning, and Programming and Interpretation. This year’s grant announcement also includes three grant programs:

National Grant Program

Conserving Black Modernism

HBCU Cultural Heritage Stewardship Initiative

Read the list of grant recipients here: SavingPlaces.Org

Mother Mary Lange, founder of first African American religious congregation, declared venerable

Pope Francis has advanced the sainthood cause of Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange, a Black religious sister who founded the country’s first African American religious congregation in Baltimore in 1829.

The recognition of Lange’s heroic virtue and the advancement of her cause from servant of God to venerable was announced by the Vatican in a decree signed on June 22. The Church will now need to approve a miracle attributed to her intercession before she can be beatified.

Elizabeth Lange, as she was named, immigrated to the United States from Cuba in the early 1800s. Recognizing the lack of education for the children of her fellow Black immigrants, with a friend she established St. Frances Academy in her own home and with her own money to offer free schooling to Baltimore’s African American children.

With the support of Baltimore Archbishop James Whitfield, she founded a school for “girls of color” and then the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first religious community for women of African descent.

The congregation’s purpose was to provide religious and general education to African Americans. Lange and the other sisters also responded to other needs they encountered over time, including taking in orphans and widows, educating freed slaves, nursing people dying during the cholera epidemic, and cleaning at St. Mary’s Seminary.

Lange took the religious name of Mary and served as the congregation’s superior general for two terms.

Lange founded the Oblate Sisters more than three decades before the Civil War and its resulting abolition of slavery within the United States. Although Maryland supported the Union, it was a slave state when Lange arrived there.

“Mother Mary Lange practiced faith to an extraordinary degree. In fact, it was her deep faith which enabled her to persevere against all odds,” the Mother Mary Lange Guild notes in an online biography. “To her Black brothers and sisters, she gave of herself and her material possessions until she was empty of all but Jesus, whom she shared generously with all by being a living witness to his teaching.”

Lange died on Feb. 3, 1882, at the age of 92 or 93, and her cause for beatification was opened over a century later, in 1991, by Baltimore Cardinal William Keeler.

[SOURCE: CNA]