When Harvard Black Alumni Society held Black History Month get-together in New York, US

It was an extraordinarily beautiful event, in celebration of the Black History Month, put together by the New York City chapter of the Harvard Black Alumni Society (HBAS) in partnership with the 138 year-old Harvard Club of New York City.

The program, which was held on Friday, February 21, 2025, at the Harvard Club’s iconic Midtown Manhattan, New York City location, was an opportunity for Black Alumni of the prestigious Ivy League University and their guests to come together to fraternize and reflect.

The turn out was, according to Jade Clark, President of the HBAS, “fabulous,” and the camaraderie was infectious.

Among the distinguished Alumni and guests that graced the event was the first professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University, Ethiopian-born 88 year old Professor Ephraim Isaac, in whose honor the Ephraim Isaac Prize for Excellence in African Languages is given annually to the Harvard graduate who writes the best essay in African studies.

Also present was Candace A. Bond, the United States Ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago, and among others a former Vice President at the celebrated Motown Records, an organization, on whose platform such international music megastars as Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, flourished.

Equally part of the mostly youthful crowd that turned out for the program was Morocco-born Dallas-based Dr. Kathy Carver, an internationally recognized Molecular Oncologist and Cancer Cell Biologist, who attended as a guest.

Also in attendance was Frederick V. Newsome, a Harvard Alumni, who spent about 10 years teaching Medicine at the University of Jos and Usmanu Danfodio University College of Medicine, Sokoto, both in Nigeria, and who has authored An African American Philosophy of Medicine, which examines race, medical knowledge and history in the United States.

It was, indeed, a memorable evening with all who attended challenging the leadership of HBAS to organize more of such events, which call, they are already heeding with two major programs lined up to round off this last week of the Black History Month.

The first is an event tonight “with author and historian, Dr. Natanya Duncan about the black women who helped define and shape the Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist aims of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the 1920s and 1930s” and the second, on Wednesday evening, “a fireside chat with Arva Rice, the President and CEO of the New York Urban League.”

Arva, according to a notice by Clark, “will be able to speak to her honest perspective on activism in the current climate from her viewpoint at the center of New York City politics and policy.” Free tickets to the events are available at: https://hbas.sigs.harvard.edu/events.html.

The Friday event did not end without clarion calls by Prof. Isaac and President Clark on all Black Alumni of Harvard University, both young and old, especially those in the New York area but, indeed, worldwide, to quickly join the Society.