Howard University is one of the United States’ most premier HBCUs, and it has recently made frequent headlines for the ambitious changes that it has been making to its reestablished College of Fine Arts. Weeks ago, Phylicia Rashad — the award-winning actress who famously starred in The Cosby Show and the 2008 television revival of A Rasin in the Sun — was named the college’s new dean.
Today, the HBCU has announced that the College of Fine Arts will also be renamed after the late actor Chadwick Boseman, who passed away in 2020 due to complications from colon cancer.
In addition to being a highly sought out actor who starred in acclaimed films such as Black Panther, 42, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Chadwick Boseman was also one of Howard University’s most noteworthy alumni. In Boseman’s family’s Twitter announcement about the Howard College of Fine Arts’ renaming, they shared a photo of an archived newspaper, and it revealed that while attending Howard, Boseman protested to prevent the College of Fine Arts from merging with the College of Arts and Sciences.
According to NPR, Boseman’s death last August inspired over 58,000 people to sign a petition for Howard’s president and board of trustees to name the school after the late actor. As fate may have it, their petition worked, and Dean Phylicia Rashad — who previously taught and mentored Boseman while teaching at Howard — will oversee the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts.
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