We hope you've enjoyed learning a bit more about Stuy's rich history during Black History Month. There are so many more to talk about, however, we know the road ahead leaves much work to be done in making opportunities available to students of color in New York City and in a commitment to Equity and Inclusion. We contnue to be dedicated to positive change.
In March we will celebrate Women's History Month and hope you join us daily to learn about the many talented women of Stuy and their contributions over the years.
2/28/2021
Erika Irish Brown, Stuy '86 is the Chief Diversity Officer at Goldman Sachs. Prior to that, she was the first ever diversity and inclusion officer at Bloomberg. She gew up in Brooklyn and maintains an active role in her community as vice-chair of the board of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation and serves on the board of the Council of Urban Professionals. After graduating Stuy, she went on to SUNY Albany then earning her MBA from Columbia Business School. She was named by The Network Journal in 2013 as a “25 Influential Black Women in Business”. Ms. Brown joined us as special guest speaker at our Open House for Accepted Students in March of 2019. Learn more about herin this article.
2/27/2021
Heyward Dotson, Stuy '66 was a basketball star, after graduating from Stuy and playing for Columbia University, Dotson was a Rhodes Scholar at a Oxford. He had a long career in law and public service.
Dotson grew up in Staten Island and commuted to Stuy from there. He was decribed as “the 6-foot-4 center who dominated with the Peglegs, not only averaging a whopping 34.0 points per game his senior year, but finishing with 1,109 career points before graduating in Stuy and Coumbia.”
He played at Stuy with Olympian and NBA Hall of Famer Charlie Scott who would have graduated Stuy in 1965 if he had not moved to North Carolina. Dotsonpassed away in May 2020 at the age of 71.
2/26/2021
Dr. Brenda Clark, Stuy ’76 "grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn, New York. She is a graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York with dual degrees in psychology and music". We were honored to have Dr. Clark join Stuy as a panel member in June 2020 at the Community Discussion on Race: Reflections on the Past, Present, and Future. Click to watch it or you can read a review of the event in The Spectator. When she was at Stuy as a student, "she presented a full-length program on WNYC’s Young American Artists series presenting piano works of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. After completing her doctorate in Clinical Psychology, she had a private practice in Manhattan as she served as a Treatment Team Leader in a NYS forensic hospital. Dr. Clark is active in voting rights and diversity efforts. She is currently an administrator in a Long Island school district coordinating programs for special needs children in seven schools".
2/25/2021
Eric Holder, or Eric Himpton Holder Jr. is a class of 1969 Stuyvesant alumnus and former United States Attorney General in President Barack Obama's administration. He went to Columbia University and Columbia Law School and among his accomplishments, he served as a judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, appointed in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan. In 1993, he was appointed by President Bill Clinton as United States Attorney the first Black American in that office
and then Deputy Attorney General. He was senior legal advisor to Barack Obama during Obama's presidential campaign was selected as President Obama's first Attorney General. Holder was born in the Bronx and raised in Queens. Holder has had a long and illustrious career in politics and law that was not free of controversy. In 2015, he rejoined the law firm he left to become Attorney General after resigning in 2014. In 2012, Holder received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement In the same year, the National Urban League named Holder as a recipient of their "Living Legend" award, along with singer Stevie Wonder
During 2018, Holder suggested on several occasions a possible run for the presidency in 2020.. now that it’s passed, perhaps we have a Stuy grad to think about for 2024….
Learn more about Eric Holder at this link. (Stuyvesant High School does not endorse political candidates in accordance with CRA D-130)
2/24/2021
Thelonious Monk, attended Stuyvesant in the late 1930s. He was an American jazz pianist and composer. Monk was one of only five jazz musicians to be featured on the cover of Time magazine. Originally from North Carolina, in 1922, he and his family moved to the Phipps Houses at West 63rd Street, in Manhattan. It was a neighborhood known as San Juan Hill because of the many African-American veterans of the Spanish–American War who lived there.
Monk started playing the piano at six years old taking lessons from a neighbor, he later attended Stuy, but did not graduate. At 17, Monk toured with an evangelist, playing the church organ, and in his late teens he began to find work playing jazz. It was a career of ups and downs at first, he worked in nightclubs and with multiple record labels, but he became enormously successful and is regarded as one of the great jazz musicians of America. Learn more in this video from his son. T.S. Monk in which the renown Danny Sherr tells the story of promoting Monk’s concert in Palo Alto when he was just 15. Monk is known as one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time, one of the first creators of modern jazz and he helped develop the school of jazz known as bebop. There are so many places to go to learn more about Thelonious Monk, we cannot even list them here…. (photo credit: William P. Gottlieb)
2/23/2021
Stuy class of 1998, Malcolm Barrett is a Brooklyn-born actor well known for his roles as a series regular on Fox's The Sketch Show and Luis. He’s also appeared in Law and Order, The Sopranos, the series finale of The Office and in the NBC series Timeless. Barrett has appeared in over 20 films and has done over 40 television appearances as well. After graduating Stuyvesant, Barrett attended NYU's Tisch School of the Arts
He was a member of the 2001 Nuyorican Slam Poetry team and the winner of the Young Playwright competition at Manhattan Class Company. He is a founding member and artistic director of the non-profit New York City theater company Real Theatre Works. He won a 2014 Ovation Award for lead actor in the play, THE STONEMASON. He’s also co-founder and artistic director of the nonprofit LA-based theater company Ammunition Theatre Company. In 2018, he appeared with high school friend and Stuyvesant Alumni Association Board member, Alice Kim on The Price is Right! Recently, he also was featured in a podcast with The Blerdgurl called “Malcolm Barrett on Acting, Activism and Allies”.
2/22/2021
1952 was a good year… for Stuy grads! Robert Parris Moses, class of ’52 is an educator and civil rights activist. After graduating Stuy, he achieved his B.A. from Hamilton College and M.A. in philosophy at Harvard and began teaching at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. Moses became one of the influential black leaders of the civil rights struggle by initiating and organizing voter registration drives in the South, sit-ins, and Freedom Schools for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He underwent racism throughout Mississippi in his work and position as director of the SNCC.
In 1982 Moses received a MacArthur Fellowship, which he used to create the Algebra Project. He was successful in spreading this in over 200 schools by the 90’s. The program is devoted to improving minority education in math. In 2005 Moses was selected as one of twelve inaugural Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellows by the Fletcher Foundation, which awards grants to scholars and activists working on civil rights issues. In 2006 Moses was named a Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of '56 Professor at Cornell University. As a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University, he taught an African American Studies class in 2012. Moses is teaching high school math in Jackson, Mississippi, and Miami, Florida. In 2001, Moses published a book, Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project. You can learn more about him in this article. Read about an evening with him in 2015 here.
2/21/2021
Emmy award winning filmmaker, William Greaves, Stuy class of 1944. Greave was a documentary filmmaker and a pioneer of African-American filmmaking. He produced more than two hundred documentary films, writing and directing more than half of these. Greaves, the recipient of four Emmy nominations in his lifetime was born in Harlem. After graduating Stuyvesant, he went to CCNY, but left to pursue a career in the theater. He started a dancer, eventually moved into acting and worked at the American Negro Theater. Limited in the roles he would get venturing into film due to racism in America, Greaves moved to Canada to try movie making, and studied at the National Film Board of Canada. He moved back to the states in the 60’s during the civil rights movement. He was hired by both the United Nations and the film division of the United States Information Agency (USIA) to make several documentaries, one of which documented the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts, a celebration of both African and African-American culture.
In 1969, the public broadcasting syndicate National Educational Television (to modern-day PBS) began to air a show called Black Journal with a mission to present news by African Americans, for African Americans, and about African Americans. The network promoted Greaves to executive producer of the show. Greaves ran the show until 1970, winning the show and himself an Emmy award for his work in 1969.
Besides the Emmy he won, Greaves was nominated for other Emmy awards as well as winning the Blue Ribbon Award at the American Film Festival for one of his films.
In 1980, Greaves was honored alongside Robert De Niro, Jane Fonda, Marlon Brando and many other ‘greats’ in New York's first ever Dusa Award. Also in 1980, he was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame and received recognition at the first Black American Independent Film Festival in Paris. In 2008 the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival honored him with its Career Award. The William Greaves Fund supports filmmakers with grants now in his memory. Learn more about him in this article from the Black Film Center Archive. (photo credit: blackfilmcenterarcive.com)
2/20/2021
Kimberly Denise Williams, Stuy ’03 is a freelance writer, host and producer and self-proclaimed ‘chatterbox’. Her blogs can be found at: http://www.kimberlythinks.com and artisnowpop. From Stuyvesant, she went on to Harvard, earning her B.A. in History and African American Studies. Afterward, she earned her Masters of Science in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. She’s been writing all along, and her work has been seen in the Harvard Crimson, Real Simple Magazine, Advertising Age, Dominion of New York, The Wonderist, For Harriet, on WNYC and on HuffPost Live. In 2007, Williams created Vanity Dark covering entertainment, politics, new music, magazines, television shows, and history. The name of the site is a play on the title of the popular magazine, Vanity Fair. From her website, check out Art is Now Pop, “a website dedicated to observing the art world from a pop culture viewpoint. The site grew out of Vanity Dark by Kimberly Thinks, which is an ongoing commentary on contemporary culture, arts, and politics.” (photo credit: kimberlydenisewilliams.com)
2/19/2021
Ret. Lt. Col. Charles Walter Dryden, Stuy alumnus 1937 and one of the original Tuskegee Airmen, consisting of America's first Black military pilots, he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II. After graduation at Stuy, Dryden attended the City University of New York (CCNY) where he majored in mechanical engineering. “When the school introduced a Civilian Pilot Training Program during his junior year in 1940, he enrolled in the program and earned a private pilot license.”
He signed up as an Air Corps cadet but was turned away at first and told the U.S. Army “didn’t take applications from blacks”. Fortunately, a month later, thanks to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign promise, U.S. Congress authorized the War Department to allow blacks to become military aviators.
In 1942, Dryden, as one of only three graduates was in the 2nd class of black pilots to graduate in U.S. Army history. He also made history in 1943 when he was engaged in aerial combat over Sicily. It was the first time in aviation history U.S. Army Air Corps had black American pilots in aircraft combat. You can read more on the Tuskegee Airmen in this article from July 2020 from the National WWII Museum.
After the war, Dryden moved on to Hofstra and Columbia Universities, earning his degrees in political science and public law respectively. Dryden later served as a professor of air science at Howard University.
In 1978, he helped found the Atlanta Chapter-Tuskegee Airmen, Inc. (ACTAI), and was a member of the board of directors of the Georgia Aviation Hall of Fame; then was inducted into the Georgia Aviation Hall of Fame in 1998.
Dryden wrote his autobiography in 1997, A-Train: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman, which was considered the best personal memoir written by a black military pilot of World War II.
He passed away at 87 in 2008.
2/18/2021
Dianne Morales, Stuy class of '85 and mayoral candidate for NYC Mayor in 2021. Morales grew up in Bed-Stuy, is Afro-Latina, and a non-profit executive who's running for political office. Most recently, the Stuyvesant High School Alumni Association hosted Morales and other Stuy alumnae running for mayor in a special event.Morales attended SUNY Stony Brook as well as the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she earned her Master of Social Administration and Columbia University where she earned a Master of Education Administration. She's went on to be a NYC public school teacher and while with the NYC DOE, she helped open the Office of Youth Development and School-Community Services and served as it's COO. She also was the director of The Teaching Commission, a national task force focused on improving teaching quality in American schools. Morales was a founding member of Jumpstart, a national early childhood non-profit organization. She also served as the Executive Director of The Door and CEO of Phipps Neighborhoods. She established a plan for what became the Broome Street Academy — the first NYC public high school targeting homeless & foster care youth. Morales still lives in Bed-Stuy with her children and parents. (photo credit: Kris Graves)
(Stuyvesant HS does not endorse political candidates for office in accordance with CRA D-130)
2/17/2021
Roy Emile Alfredo Innis, Stuy '52, activist and politician was National Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) from 1968 until his death in early 2017. He came to NYC from the U.S. Virgin Islands with his mother in 1947 and after graduating from Stuyvesant was in the U.S. Army and then attended City College. Innis' first involvement with CORE was in 1963. He was made Chairman in 1965; he campaigned for the establishment of an independent Board of Education for Harlem.
Innis co-drafted the Community Self-Determination Act of 1968, which was the first in U.S. history for any civil rights organization to introduce into the United States Congress. Innis became involved in the issue of gun control prompted by the loss of two of his sons in 1968 and 1982. They were both killed by criminal gun violence. He served on the board of the NRA. Although unsuccessful, Innis also opposed David Dinkins in a mayoral primary in New York City in 1993. His actions throughout the years as well as his beliefs were not without contraversy as his conservative views, sometimes wound up on a critical end of other civil rights movements such as BLM. (photo credit: jbhe.com)
2/16/2021
Class of 2002's Adriana Diaz is today's featurd alumna we are celebrating! Adriana is a Diaz is a CBS News national correspondent based in Chicago. After attending Stuyvesant, she went on to Princeton to acheive a master's degree in Public Affairs and Public Administration. Adriana has worked with CBS in Bejing and in NYC and is fluent in three languages.. She also returned to Stuy in September of 2019 and interviewed the stars of the film "In the Shadow of the Towers" prior to it's premiere in the Murray Khan Theater at Stuyvesant! You can check out Adriana's interiew in our Stuy library here. Adriana is not only a talented journlaist, she was Miss New York USA 2006 and Miss New York Teen USA 2003.! Brains and Beauty combined 👏🏼😉 . Diaz is also a board member of the Harmony Program, which provides music education to students in under-served communities in NYC. (photo credit: CBS)
2/15/2021
It's President's Day! POTUS 46 has chosen some 'spot on' Stuyvesant alumni as part of his cabinet! G. Robert Watts, class of '77 who was appointed to the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force! The press release from the White House can be read at this link. 'Bobby' Watts went from Stuy to Cornell and Columia where he left with two Masters; in public health and epidemiology. He also holds a Certificate of Theological Studies. He was the chief executive officer of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council and formerxecutive director of New York City’s Care for the Homeless from 2005-2017. Congrats to Bobby Watts on his appointment!
2/14/2021
Today we celebrate Olympic Foil Fencer Nzingha Prescod, Stuy Alumna '10 and the most decorated African American woman in U.S. fencing history. Nzingha participated in both the 2012 and 2016 Olympics. She was a bronze medalist at the 2015 World Fencing Championships, the same year she completed her undergrad degree at Columbia University where she was the first African American woman to win an individual medal at the Senior World Championships (2015). Nzingha was also the first U.S. women's foil fencer to win a Grand Prix title (2013, Marseilles). Nzingha ended her fencing career in 2020ranked #3 in the U.S, and #12 in the world! She retired from competitive fencing in 2020 after hip replacement surgery. In addition to volunteering her time to teach fencing at the Peter Westbrook Foundation, Nzingha is also a Sports Equity Advocate speaker advocating for high-quality and accessible sports eduction that is incusive. and founded Fencing in the Park, a community-based, outdoor summer series started in June 2020 in Brooklyn that introduced fencing to children of color. She also currently is a Senior Consultant in data analytics for EY (Ernst & Young) where she stayed on after being selected among eight Olympians for internships by the Women Athletes Business Network. She only recently retired from her distinguished career in 2020 after hip replacement surgery after fencing in pain for some time. (Read more here) Nzingha was part of the Notable Black Alumni Panel in May 2018 and also honored by the Stuyvesant High Scool Alumni Associationat their inaugural benefit in 2019 as a 'Golden Pegleg' winner for Outstanding Young Alumnus/a. The photo collage includes some pictures from Nzingha's last visit with BSL/Aspira at Stuyvesant in January 2020 and of the SHSAA Benefit and Nzingha at the Women's Sports Foundation's 39th Annual Salute to Women in Sports in 2018. (photo credits: Getty images & Travis W. Keyes photography). We hope to see her again at Stuy soon!
2/13/2021
Alvin Francis Poussaint, M. D. is an African American psychiatrist, author, public speaker ad once TV consultant to popular shows like The Cosby Show and A Different World as well as Harvard Medical School Dean of Students and Stuy, class of '52. His work focuses on the mental health of African Americans and in influenced by the civil rights movement in the South after 1965. Poussaint is a Stuyvesant alumnus, class of 1952. As an immigrant from Haiti, he grew up in East Harlem with his seven siblings. It was during a hospitalization for rheumatic fever that he became interested in science and continued that through Stuyvesant, Columbia and Cornell Medical School. After leaving UCLA and heading south, Pousssaint become the Southern Field Director of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Jackson, Mississippi. "Poussaint believed that racism was the major mental health problem of the black community." He went on to become the Dean of Students at Harvard and strongly believed in affirmative action assisting 16 African American students at Harvard himself. He founded the Media Center of the Judge Baker's Children's Center and was consulted by the FBI and White House and is a life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. His work in psychology regarding race relations is well known. You can read more about him and his controversial book and more here. More on his history here.
Week of 2/8/2021
Thomas Sowell is an American economist, a social theorist and senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute; and one of Stuy's amazing students from the 1940s!
He dropped out of Stuyvesant High School at the age of 17 due to financial difficulties at home where he was being raised by a great aunt in Harlem. Originally from North Carolina, Thomas Sowell was the first one in his family to study past the 6th grade. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps in the Korean War and returned to attend night classes as Howard University. He did so well on college board exams, he went on to Harvard for his B. A. and Columbia for his Masters as well as a Doctor of Philosophy degree in economics from UChicago. Thomas Sowell has taught at major universities around the country, received the National Humanities Medal in 2002, held a syndicated column until 2016 at the age of 86; and completed his latest book in 2018; oh... and about a week ago on January 25, 2021 a documentary was released detailing his career entitled, "Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World”! Read more about Thomas Sowell here or more here.
Week of 2/1/2021
Our own Stuyvesant heros, class of 1995, fraternal Stuy Alumi twin sisters Uché and Oni Blackstock who both attended Harvard undergrad and medical school after graduating Stuyvesant and became the first Black mother-daughter legacy to graduate Harvard medical school!
The Doctors Blackstock's accomplishments are more numerous to list here -- take a few minutes to read the links. We are #stuyproud!
2/1/2021 National Freredom Day
Did you know that February 1, the first day of the month is a day of significance? It's National Freedom Day!
In 1942, Richard R. Wright, civial rights advocate and author, lobbied for the creation of the National recognition of this day. He was 86 at the time!
February 1 commemorated the date Abraham Lincoln signed the joint resolution that led to the 13th Amenedment to abolish slavery.
On Jan. 25, 1949, President Harry Truman signed a bill establishing National Freedom Day. Learn more here: https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/us/national-freedom-day
