Howard Dodson

Howard Dodson, Jr (born June 6, 1939) is an American scholar who is the Director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and Howard University Libraries, and was formerly the long-time director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, which post he occupied for over a quarter of a century (1984–2010).

Dodson grew up in Chester, Pennsylvania, where his family had moved from Virginia. His parents worked blue-collar jobs in construction and textiles. He attended West Chester State College, and then earned a master's in history and political science at Villanova. In 1964, he joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Ecuador. In 1968, believing he had responsibilities in the United States during the civil rights movement, he returned, stopping in Puerto Rico for a period of reflection and then going to Berkeley to study slavery in the Western Hemisphere. From 1974 to 1979 he worked as the executive director of the Atlanta-based Institute of the Black World, in addition to teaching classes at Emory University. Dodson was later a consultant to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) until 1984.

Dodson took on the directorship of the Schomburg Center in 1984 and had a successful tenure, during which he increased the center's holdings of historical artifacts—many of them rare and irreplaceable—from 5 to 10 million, curated numerous displays and exhibitions, and raised millions of dollars in support. One high point was his intimate involvement in the African Burial Ground project, through which the remains of hundreds of former slaves buried in Manhattan during the 17th and 18th centuries were exhumed and reburied.

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