Martin Luther King, Jr. After-School Program: Content to Bridge the Digital Divide

Director: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Executive Director for Academic Matters: Karen C. C. Dalton

Address:
104 Mt. Auburn Street, Floor 2R
Cambridge, MA 02138

Telephone: 617.495.8508
Fax: 617.495.8511

Goals

The Martin Luther King, Jr. After-School Program has two principal goals:

  • To bridge the "digital divide" between blacks and whites in America through the use of content with a black perspective
  • To provide content about the history and culture of Africa and of people of African descent to African American youths


Content

In 1909, W. E. B. Du Bois, the Harvard-trained historian, sociologist, journalist, and political activist, had an important idea. He dreamed of editing an "Encyclopedia Africana," a comprehensive compendium of "scientific" knowledge about the history, cultures, and social institutions of people of African descent: of Africans in the Old World, African Americans in the New World, and persons of African descent who had risen to prominence in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The Encyclopedia Africana would be the black equivalent of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Ninety years later, in October 1999, Du Bois's dream became a reality. Harvard professors Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., released Encarta Africana, a CD-ROM encyclopedia devoted to Africa and the people of African descent worldwide.

Produced by Microsoft, this electronic compendium of information about the black world contains approximately 10 million words, comprising more than 4,300 articles and about 2,000 photos, videos, sound recordings, and sidebars.  Special media features include a:

  • Timeline that begins with Lucy in East Africa 4 million years ago and end with President Bill Clinton's trip to Africa in 1998
  • Timeline of African American Music, spanning from the Fisk Jubilee Singers to Lauryn Hill
  • Multi-layered, "channel-changing" maps of Africa and of the Diaspora from Africa to the New World
  • Virtual tours of such far-flung bastions of black culture as the monumental stone ruins at Great Zimbabwe and the streets of Harlem
  • Videos of prominent individuals discussing some of Africana's principal topics, such as General Colin Powell on "Blacks in the U.S. Military"
  • Whoopi Goldberg on the thorny question, "What Is Race?" and Cornel West on "The Quest for Freedom"

Africana also provides a Library of Black America in which the user finds the fully searchable texts of 140 books written by Africans and African Americans between 1773 and 1919, plus the "Men of the Month" articles Du Bois published in The Crisis between 1911 and 1931--an extraordinary tool for both the general reader and the classroom.

In a speech before the United Negro College Fund in 1999, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., remarked: "Now that we finally have this compendium of knowledge about Africa and the African Diaspora, we must create ways of getting this material to young people. We need an African American version of Hebrew school." Working from that simple idea and with funding from the Markle Foundation, Appiah and Gates launched the Martin Luther King, Jr. After-School Program under the aegis of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University. The aims of this initiative are to:

  • Bridge the "digital divide" between blacks and whites in the United States
  • Provide content about the history and culture of Africa and of people of African descent to African American youths

The plan is relatively simple. The Martin Luther King After-School Program places computers equipped with Internet access and Encarta Africana in black churches and community centers nationwide. In the After-School Program, our young people are acquiring knowledge about people of African descent worldwide from Africana, and at the same time they learn the cyber skills they will need to navigate to success in the 21st century.

The Program and its Participants

Working with Reverend Eugene F. Rivers 3d, pastor of the Azusa Christian Community in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, Gates and Appiah established a pilot site in the Ella J. Baker House, which functions as an out-of-school academy. Students come from Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, the poorest neighborhoods in Boston; from two district high schools, Dorchester and Burke High Schools; and from Dorchester District Court. The curriculum is drawn from Encarta Africana.  Appiah, Gates, and the Markle Foundation believed that it was important to test the idea that Africana-centered content can help bridge the digital divide in a community that is among the most underserved. If the hypothesis worked in Dorchester, it should be successful most anywhere else. By the end of its second year at the Ella J. Baker House, clearly the experiment was working. Young people between the ages of 12 and 17 were learning African and African American history and culture and solid computer skills.

The building blocks of the program's curriculum are lesson plans that are provided free of charge online at The Africana Blackboard. Appiah and Gates worked with a network of teachers nationwide to develop this body of lesson plans and teaching modules, all of which are drawn from and present the material in Encarta Africana. (Currently, The Africana Blackboard has a catalogue of about 250 lesson plans and includes a complete course in African American history.) Young people attending the Martin Luther King, Jr. After-School Program take at least two structured classes per week in African American and African history and culture. Learning material that has particular relevance to the students' own lives and personal histories sparks and retains the students' interest, thus increasing their focus and facilitating their ability to absorb information and learn skills.

Students learn to navigate within the Encarta Africana CD-ROM and on the Internet; they are acquiring cyberskills that are important for social and economic participation, thus increasing their ability to perform in the school classroom today and on the job tomorrow, if not sooner. In short, one of the central goals is to place these young people, who are among our most disadvantaged, on the information super highway.