Claflin University’s Deeply Rooted Commitment to Social Justice

Dr. Dwaun Warmack was just miles from the town of Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 when the police taking pictures dying of teenager Mike Brown ignited unrest and sparked countrywide debate about the romantic relationship among the Black community and law enforcement.

At the time, Dwaun was practically a thirty day period into his new position as president of nearby Harris-Stowe State College. He claims Brown’s death was deeply felt by the campus community offered that 40% of the college students hailed from Ferguson. To support the group mend, learn and shift ahead, he manufactured absolutely sure that all the ensuing discussions with law enforcement, municipalities, leaders and legislators were being held on campus.

“We experienced a civic and moral responsibility to be the think tank to assistance the group recover,” explains Dwaun. “I really do not consider social justice is an action or event. It’s who you are as a college. It is in the DNA.”

Currently, he’s the president of Claflin University in South Carolina, just one of the nation’s major 10 Traditionally Black Faculties and Universities (HBCUs), in which his longstanding dedication to social justice aligns with the university’s basis. He describes how Claflin, which opened in 1869, was established on standard social justice ideas and became the very first institution in the region to award a degree to a girl of any race or qualifications.

Quickly just after signing up for Claflin in 2019, the university proven the Center for Social Justice, which is supported by Gilead’s Racial Equity Local community Impression Fund. He views the Heart for Social Justice as a auto for reworking attitudes and imagining about race when also reshaping devices that have traditionally deprived Black communities. The centre presently conducts diversity, equity and inclusion instruction for law enforcement departments, civic governments and organizations around the place. It is also targeted on wellbeing disparities, conducting study on why Blacks endure disproportionately from situations these kinds of as superior blood tension, diabetic issues and most recently, COVID-19.  

“Blacks are dying at a increased amount than any person else of COVID-19, but COVID is not racist,” Dwaun says. Rather, Blacks are impacted by a selection of socioeconomic variables these kinds of as absence of entry to top quality well being treatment, he points out. To aid cure the problem, Claflin is forming a partnership with a main healthcare corporation to give telehealth services to rural communities in South Carolina using a residence-centered technological innovation. The intention is to produce a product that can be adapted for use through the condition.

Early final yr, the middle introduced a Pathways from Jail schooling system, in which some 100 incarcerated individuals in South Carolina are performing toward their school degrees. Dwaun understands the worth that education delivers as he had to battle towards prevailing social forces to become the 1st member of his family to go to college or university. His grandmother was a sharecropper and his father was incarcerated when he was a baby. His mother, who elevated him and four other siblings, experienced minimal education but identified the value of training and preached that it was “the wonderful equalizer.”

Though he admits he wasn’t the best scholar in large school, Dwaun was privileged to have a “guardian angel” and mentors who believed in him and confirmed him the way, even guiding him as a result of the course of action of making use of for higher education economical help.

“I am unapologetic about mentoring young people today,” he exclaims. “It’s our mission to academically, personally, socially and spiritually develop college students.”

Dwaun notes that HBCUs have been basic to constructing a class of Black pros in the United States. Although HBCUs stand for less than 3% of colleges and universities in the state, they develop 23% of the country’s Black graduates. Some 40% of Black men and women with STEM (science, know-how, engineering and arithmetic) levels were educated at HBCUs, and 70% of Black dentists and medical practitioners working towards today attended HBCUs. He claims these schools and universities be successful by building a nurturing setting that takes a holistic tactic to educating learners.

“At HBCUs, no issue how you occur in, you are much far better when you get out,” he claims. “It’s critical that our pupils have true influence, to produce a a lot more just culture for all.”