The Laney Graduate School cultivates an environment of openness, diversity, and integrity. This sense of community attracts academic leaders with remarkable knowledge. Here they find a library that is among the nation’s leading research centers for literature and African American history, as well as academic strengths fortified by grantors like the National Endowment for the Humanities.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Rudolph P. Byrd was a senior in a Denver high school. Full of emotion but too young to understand the import of the tragedy, he began searching for answers. His teachers guided him through history and literature as he studied the civil rights movement and the men and women who made it happen. Along the way, he felt a growing sense of indebtedness. Byrd’s studies led him to the work of James Weldon Johnson, an author, composer, lawyer, and civil rights pioneer.
Today Byrd has a doctorate from Yale and a distinguished history of scholarship, and he has founded an academic institute at Emory to honor Johnson. Central to the intellectual life of the University, the James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies fosters new scholarship, teaching, and public dialogue on the modern civil rights movement. A professor in the Department of African American Studies as well as Emory’s Institute of the Liberal Arts, Byrd has shared the fruits of another relationship with Emory as well. His friendship with Alice Walker has resulted in the Alice Walker Literary Society—an academic partnership with Atlanta’s Spelman College—and Emory’s acquisition of the writer’s papers.
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