I chose to write my blog post about a largely forgotten but incredibly important African American educational pioneer Dr. Frederick D. Patterson.
As a Gates scholar myself, and through internships and consultant jobs with the United Negro College Fund (which he founded), my life has largely been shaped by the legacy of this man who fought for a lifetime to expand collegiate access and opportunities for talented African American youth.
Dr. Patterson founded the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), which administers Bill Gates’ $1.5 billion scholarship endowment. This fund helped to pay for my undergraduate degree at the George Washington University and has supported over 7,000 college graduates from disadvantaged backgrounds.
During my undergraduate education I began working with the research division of UNCF, which is called the Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute. There I gained invaluable experience researching and writing educational research reports.
However, throughout my time working there, I always wondered who was the man behind the name of the research institute. When I looked him up online, I found biographies, but curiously his Wikipedia page had only a paragraph of very skeletal information.
This is odd because when you look at the long list of accomplishments of this man even before the iconic Civil Rights movement gained any momentum, it’s hard to believe there’s not a ton of information on him out there. So, given how my own life has been so strongly influenced by this man’s professional accomplishments and personal aspirations for African American youth just like me, I naturally wanted to correct this criminal deficit of information.
There is much information, details and citations still missing from this article. For instance, although I know during his tenure as President of Tuskegee University (then Tuskegee Institute), he established the Commercial Aviation Program, which trained the pilots that would eventually be popularly coined as the Tuskegee Airmen. Again, this one man’s incredible vision facilitated the birth of a United States military legend, the exceptionally skilled, all African American pilots in a still severely segregated America.
I want to add a section specifically on the Tuskegee Airmen, but I need to find more reliable sources to flesh out the story and to better reference some of this information. I know that he also had an autobiography, so I would like to add much more detail to the post after reading it.
In addition to a need for more robust citations, the formatting also took me a little while to master. The article in its current state contains much more information than what I initially found, but going forward it will need additional citations and a more robust list of references. This will take more time and effort than I could dedicate in one assignment, but I hope to return to and improve this article going forward.
holmesspeaksout 