Dr. Fred L. Hord felt isolated and frustrated in his first year as director of a Black culture center at West Virginia University because of the lack of networking among his peers in the state and region.
So at a meeting of the American Council on Education, Hord proposed creating a national network of Black culture centers, an idea that fellow directors embraced enthusiastically. Thus was born the Association for Black Culture Centers in 1987.
About 50 individuals representing two dozen schools attended its first conference at Knox College in Illinois, where Hord had relocated to run that school’s center. From that modest beginning, ABCC, as it is known, has grown to attract 200 to 550 participants to its annual conferences.
The criteria for membership were broad enough to include colleges in the Caribbean and West Africa, as well as American museums and community centers. Despite the “Black” in its name, ABCC has long included multicultural campus centers.
That expansion was made explicit this summer when ABCC’s website began to note that the organization “includes African American, Latino, Native American, & Asian Centers.” There are no plans to change the name, though, says Hord, ABCC’s executive director.
“I think we should be able to integrate through the Black experience, just like we’ve been integrating through other people’s experience,” says Hord, also chair of Africana Studies at Knox. “I think we ought to increasingly connect with Latinos, Native Americans, Asians and we need to increase involvement with progressive Whites.”
