Professor of History and Africana Studies Amilcar Shabazz Receives 2024 Distinguished Community Engagement Award
Content
Amilcar Shabazz, professor of history and Africana Studies, was selected to receive the 2024 Distinguished Community Engagement Award from the Office of the Provost.
This award—which includes a $2,500 monetary prize and a plaque of recognition—recognizes a faculty member or librarian for a record of community-engaged service that demonstrates engagement and impact in the community and benefit to UMass Amherst.
This recognition follows Shabazz's 2023 Ruth B. Loving Civil Rights Award, which honored his life scholarship and activism championing historical truth telling and Black reparations in Massachusetts, across the U.S. and the world.
A noted scholar, social and racial justice activist, Shabazz has served as the seventh chair for the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies from 2007 to 2012. From 2013 to 2016, he was the Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor for Diversity and Excellence, and, from 2016 to 2022, he acted as the department’s interim chair. He continues to teach in the department with an emphasis on the political economy of social and cultural movements, education and public policy.
In addition to working as a professor, Shabazz is the author of books such as “The Forty Acres Documents,” an anthology of writings published almost thirty years ago that revealed the Black demand for reparations and promises made but not kept by the U.S. government. He has done research, taught classes and continually advocated for reparations, including serving as a member of the African Heritage Reparations Assembly set up by the Town of Amherst to develop a plan for a local reparative justice program.
Shabazz also led efforts to encourage the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to establish Juneteenth as a state and then a national holiday.