The project’s overall objective is to place the black experience at MIT in its full and appropriate context, by pulling together and disseminating a varied set of materials and by exposing a larger community of interests—both inside and outside MIT—to this rich, historically significant legacy. This project seeks to identify, assemble, organize, analyze, interpret, and provide access to a broad range of materials on the black experience at MIT; to cultivate public interest in these materials; and to encourage widespread participation in studying, preserving, and disseminating them. After completing and exploring a considerable amount of information from the MIT archives and Museum, oral history—including TECHNOLOGY AND THE DREAM, a black alumni survey, and other relevant archival materials, the next phase of this project is to develop a Web-Based History of the Black Experience at MIT.

Click here for an important message from Clarence G. Williams, MIT Professor of Urban Studies & Planning and Special Assistant To the President, Emeritus. Thank you.Gifts from alumni/ae and friends to support the Black History Project Fund (3839050) accepted at Giving to MIT

Blacks at MIT History Project

Sylvester James Gates Jr. ‘73, PhD ‘77, a physicist and mathematician renowned for his pioneering work in theoretical physics and for his commitment and creativity in communicating scientific concepts, has been named Martin Luther King, Jr., Visiting Professor in Physics for 2010-2011.

Who Inspired You? - Featuring Gates and Jackson

TUSKEGEE, Alabama (July 30, 2010) – In a final action prior to his departure, Dr. Benjamin F. Payton, President of Tuskegee University, announced today that the Board of Trustees approved his recommendation to elevate the Department of Architecture at Tuskegee University to School status. Simultaneously, the Board named the unit the Robert R. Taylor School of Architecture, in honor of the first black to graduate in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Taylor accepted the task to set up the architecture program at Tuskegee in 1892, at the invitation of the institution's founder, Booker T. Washington. Taylor's handiwork is seen all over the historic district of the campus and in the history books of American architects. read more ...