News from Vanderbilt University

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Frank Dobson Jr. slyly smiles when asked if activities at the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center at Vanderbilt University might kick up some controversy under his tenure.

"I hope so," he says. "I hope so."

Dobson, a writer and poet, has been named the new director of the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center, coinciding with the fall opening of its expanded and refurbished campus home. Dobson leaves a position as director of the Bolinga Black Cultural Resources Center at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

"Frank Dobson's experience and vision will allow the Vanderbilt community and Nashville to realize the true value and meaning of learning and discovering in a diverse community," said Nicholas Zeppos, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs. "We are very pleased that he will be joining us."

Dobson said the key to a successful black cultural center is "creation of community."

"A black cultural center needs to be a place where people can feel at home, and I don't mean just black people. It needs to be a base for whites as well as blacks. If I don't accomplish that, then I won't fulfill what I need to fulfill."

The Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center will be a center for student interaction and support and a source of cultural programming and community outreach, Dobson said.

"As a working-class kid from Buffalo who went into academia, I'm sensitive to how foreign a college campus can seem to people of certain backgrounds," he said. "I would like to do a program here that I did at Lafayette College, where we brought African American kids from the community-maybe 5- to 10-years-old-on campus for educational activities. The point is to get it across to them that they can belong here. This is not foreign territory. They can aspire to this."

Dobson's father worked in steel mills in Buffalo for 40 years, and his mother held a variety of jobs including work as a domestic. He graduated from State University of New York at Buffalo and earned a doctoral degree in English from Bowling Green State University. He worked as a graduate assistant to writer James Baldwin while in Ohio, and the first chapter of his dissertation was about that writer.

"I know the doubts that can get in the way of achievement," Dobson said. "'Do I belong here? Am I as good as they are?"

"Those kinds of feelings of inadequacy were assuaged for me by support systems that I had at home and in the community, as much as support that I had on campus. Here, we have a black cultural center that can help a student who may have those feelings of inadequacy."

Programming at the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center will span the interests and concerns of African Americans, and Dobson says he will not shrink away from touchy subjects. Among his wish list is discussion of genocide in the Sudan and why there is not more outrage in the United States about it.

"I think a black cultural center at a major university in the South has the potential to do things that aren't possible elsewhere," he said, "because of the history of the South, the history of the Civil Rights Movement starting in the South, and the history of blacks and whites interacting sometimes in a volatile manner," Dobson said.

"Because of that, a black cultural center at a Vanderbilt has the opportunity not only to educate, but if there are some wounds that are still open, to help salve the wounds."

Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
Jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu