A newsletter for students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends
NOVEMBER 2020
Winter commencement sidelined by COVID-19 UMES grads find solace reaching their goal just the same UMES’ class of 2020 will have stories to tell at future reunions unlike those of Hawk alumni who came before them over the previous 100 years. Two hundred twenty-eight students finished degree work this fall under trying circumstances as the coronavirus prohibited commencement festivities. An alarming nation-wide surge in the spread of COVID-19 forced the historically Black university to cancel traditional graduation ceremonies for a second time this year. Nonetheless, UMES students are appreciative, resilient and upbeat about what the future holds. Naasira Brown-El, English, Baltimore: “Coming into school, I wasn’t really happy. But I can say today I’m a happy, fun, intelligent person. I have UMES to thank for that. It’s a place that helped me become an adult.” “(Graduation) is one of the biggest steps of my life. It’s no more ‘I’m a child.’ It’s a stepping stone to my adult life. I can do it. I told myself I would graduate. It’s a major goal I accomplished.” Jose Garcia, Electrical Engineering Technology, District Heights, Md.: “Being a UMES student … motivated me. It made me who I am. It pushed me to be someone better. Being a Hawk means something dearly to me.” “Sophomore year was a tough year for me. I had some distractions. I didn’t know if I was going to overcome it. Friends and family rallied around me. Three words I learned to live by: ‘in due time.’” “Graduating … means the world to me. I almost dropped out. I know my family is proud of me. All eyes are on me. It makes me want to cry. It’s real now.”
A virtual graduation celebration is set for Dec. 18. Page 2
Hawks on VP-elect Kamala Harris
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Veteran Profile
Page 4-5 Racial Equity
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Young Lee, Golf Management, Mt. Airy, Md.: “It has been a very humbling experience being a UMES student. I had my ups and downs. But you have all the resources here you need to succeed. It’s up to you to take advantage. You learn to make choices for yourself.” “You just have to keep looking for your happiness, what you are passionate about and then follow that path. That worked for me.” “It’s the end of a chapter, and a new chapter begins. I feel like I’m a freshman in life. I want to keep on learning. You can never quite master it. If I can impact a life or two, that’s what I would like to do.” Jordan Robinson, Criminal Justice, Rockville, Md.: “The university is an open and welcoming place. I liked it was a closeknit community where you could get to know others easily. Plus, there was the ‘HBCU’ element and the special camaraderie that goes along with that.” “It just seems easier to talk to professors, or get help with finances, your class schedule. You’re not lost in 400-student classes.” “Becoming a law enforcement officer will be a stepping stone for me. My goal is to be a special agent – maybe a homicide detective.” “I know in my heart I will do right by the public, and abide by people’s constitutional rights – represent the profession as best I can.”
Music Therapy Grant
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Aviation Science Gift
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American Association of State Colleges and Universities
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Student Perspective
Hawks weigh in on the HERstoric 2020 election The 2020 general election resulted in the selection of Sen. Kamala Harris as the United States’ first Black female Vice President. VP-elect Harris is a HBCU alumna and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. Undergraduate women at the historically Black University of Maryland Eastern Shore react: Semaj Fielding: “The election of Sen. Kamala Harris reinforces my belief I can do anything I put my mind to. Black women have been seen as the backbone of our country, but haven’t received the true support we deserve and require. I believe our generation is recognizing the strength black women possess, and it encourages me they will be there to support me (in) my future endeavors. “As a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., I am overjoyed the first female vice president is a member of my illustrious sorority. (It) exemplifies excellence and is another example of how we do so. For generations of Alpha women to come, they will be encouraged to know one of our own served as the first Black, female vice president of the United States of America.” Rakyiah Chambers: “Being … this was the first year I could get into politics, it was nice to witness a woman running in this year’s election. I was amazed how it all played out. Kamala Harris can assist Joe Biden as his vice president and I hope they can undo any damage our last president caused. “For Kamala to become our new vice president-elect in such unprecedented times, shows other young ladies and me that women are just as unstoppable as men. We are just as elite, we can do anything we put our minds to.” Sarah Adewumi: ”I was so ecstatic to hear about Sen. Kamala Harris’ historic election to be the next vice president; through this trailblazing moment, I believe every Black girl, every Asian girl, every Indian girl, can know their power, and understand how awesome it is. This election has shown every young aspiring woman, like me, that it IS possible to have not only a seat at the table, but be at the HEAD of the table; and I guarantee more Black women will continue to show up and show out in politics for years to come. For student leaders, especially at HBCUs, this election has put fire in our spirits to serve, at some point, in our local communities after graduation.” Ciani Wells: “It is phenomenal Sen. Kamala Harris has been elected as the next vice president of the United States. This historic happening has undeniably given hope and pride to women, especially those of color. Not only are women empowered by her win, but HBCU students everywhere are also invigorated and more proud than ever of the education they have obtained from their historically Black colleges and universities. “Her election has sparked hope in people across the globe and has shown those who previously felt like the underdogs that it is possible to break barriers and make history, also known as HERstory!”
Veteran’s Profile
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A Purple Heart pulsing proudly Yancy Carrigan found his voice behind a WESM microphone Fifty years ago this past August, 1st Lt. Yancy Carrigan was on patrol in Vietnam when a flash caught his eye as he surveilled the thick jungle underbrush for signs of trouble. Trouble found Carrigan in the form of a sniper’s bullet that entered the left side of his face at his lip, exited his neck and lodged in his right shoulder. He was the lone platoon member who “went down that day,” Aug. 18, 1970. His abbreviated, two-month tour of duty in a war that roiled America was over, but he has refused to let the experience define him. Instead, the man behind the microphone weekday mornings at WESM, which features “jazz, blues and NPR news,” has drawn strength and joy from playing music and entertaining listeners for more than three decades. His military service, Carrigan said, “is not something I usually bring up.” “I’m OK with talking about it – if asked,” he said. “But I don’t go around volunteering a lot of information.” What Carrigan did volunteer to do a year after the public radio station launched in 1987 was to sit in as an unpaid, on-air personality. By 1995, he was hired to deliver his eclectic tastes of jazz, blues and gospel to Delmarva’s aficionados of those genres, making him one of the region’s longest-running radio personalities. Carrigan’s distinctive vocal stylings features
a soft, low-timbre cadence deliberately delivered in a way that can make first-time listeners pause. After being shot, he spent the first six months of a 16-month rehabilitation stay at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center with his mouth wired shut. The day doctors took the wires out, he feasted on steak. The next day, surgeons took a piece of bone from his hip and grafted it into his jaw, wiring his mouth shut another two months. Carrigan remembers seeing others with missing arms and legs and traumatic brain injuries. He thought himself lucky and determinedly learned how to speak again, even though he had lost a third of his tongue to the bullet wound. The Salisbury native recovered to finish
a four-year Reserve Officer Training Corps commitment he made at Morgan State College, then mustered out as a captain. Carrigan applied to a handful of high-profile employers on the Lower Shore. The DuPont nylon plant in Seaford was the only one that offered him a job, one he held for a little over two decades before a corporate “downsizing.” WESM’s Milton Blackman knew Carrigan played recorded music on weekends at a local American Legion home and approached him about showcasing his talents as a radio host. “I’d never done anything like that,” Carrigan said. “I like music, and I figured ‘why not?’.” Now, some three decades later, Carrigan is synonymous with WESM. Carrigan celebrated his 74th birthday this past January and recently told WESM management he’ll end his four-day-a-week morning show just before Christmas, when the university goes on holiday break. (He’ll continue doing his two live Saturday shows – “Music from the Wax Museum” and “Blues Train.”) “The reason I’m still working is I love what I do,” he said. Behind a microphone afforded him a way to express his individualism. “I never wanted to be like everybody. I wanted to be me,” Carrigan said. “I enjoy being me. I’ve always been me.”
Alumni an
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Protesting Injustice: T
(L-R) Edmonds, Wells, Fielding, and Dr. Stevenson photographed on the SSC Theater stage on Oct. 15.
UMES alumni and students discuss “Racial Equity:Then and Now” As the COVID-19 pandemic changed our way of life, the pandemic of racial injustice has long infected this nation. In mid-October, Maryland State College alumni joined current University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES) students as participants in “Racial Equity: Then and Now,” a virtual hour-long discussion on the past experience and contributions of Maryland State students and the state of racial justice today. Implementing social distancing guidelines, a limited number of guests were present in the Student Services Center Theater when the panelists responded to questions from the moderator, Dr. Marshall Stevenson Jr., dean of the School of Education Social Sciences and the Arts. Panel members included Starletta DuPois (MSC ’68), Curtis Gentry (MSC ’66), Willie Baker (MSC ’65), Dr. Percy Thomas
(MSC’65), Stephanie Edmonds (class of 2021, Semaj Fielding (class of 2022), and Ciani Wells (class of 2022). Like many people in the United States and internationally, the feeling of “disbelief and anger” was apparent as Edmonds expressed her thoughts on the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, which fueled the unrest the world witnessed this past summer. “It was a lot to take in. To be 22 years old, this has been going on since my mother was a child, and before that and before that,“ the Prince George’s County native said. “It begs the question. Is anything going to change? What can I do and what can we do to make that change?” “My mind was enraged, but my heart was broken,” said Wells, a Philadelphia native who participated in protests this past summer. “I knew
d Students
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The UMES Experience that because these people were silenced it would take us as a group to pick up where they left off and turned their cries into yells for equality and justice.” Dr. Thomas linked his experience as a Maryland State student in the early 1960s to what’s happening today by describing the prevalent racism he faced and how others seem to be trying to return to the Jim Crow era. “I think today we are beginning to see a more overt, coming out of the closet if you will, of putting Black people back in their place,” Thomas said. “I hope that our students recognize that their striving for excellence is not viewed by many people of a different racial hue as excellence at all. It is viewed as they are stepping out of their place.” The panelists also addressed the importance of using your vote and your voice. “I’m delighted that you are engaged and involved. We need thousands of you to do that,” Thomas said. Noting the geographical location of UMES in Princess Anne, Md., Thomas urged young people to “study your history and teach it to your children and young adults.” “You are in an abolitionist’s playground down there on the Eastern Shore (home of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman),” he said. Moving some in the audience to tears, the stirring discussion included
mentions of horrific local history including the 1933 lynching of George Armwood and a cross burning on the then Maryland State’s campus. According to newspaper reports, Armwood was accused of a crime and abducted from the Princess Anne jail by a mob prior to being lynched and burned. Baker, Gentry, and Thomas were put into the same jail as students protesting injustice in the 1960s. In discussing her Maryland State experience, DuPois, a Tonynominated theater and film actress, shared the impact of the cross burning and how male students were willing to protect the women on campus. “To see the smoldering ashes and the flames from this cross struck something in me that I knew whatever it would take for me to be a part of a change. I was willing to die in order to live,” DuPois said. “Fellas formed a human chain around the women’s dormitory. Other things occurred that night.” In the midst of the injustices Maryland State alumni shared, each was clear about their experiences and the university’s role in their lives. “Four of the greatest years of my life that I would not ever wanted to have missed,” said Gentry, a retired NFL athlete who became emotional while expressing his gratitude for his experience at the historically Black college.
“Four of the greatest years of my life that I would not ever wanted to have missed.” - Curtis Gentry
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School News
What to do about pandemic-related depression The University of Maryland Eastern Shore is creating a research training program to treat and hopefully prevent depression in rural nursing home residents without relying exclusively on medication. The university has secured a pair of grants in recent months worth a combined $258,000 from the Maryland Department of Health and the Rural Maryland Council to focus on ways to address social isolation, anxiety and depression exacerbated by the pandemic. UMES researchers will be incorporating the latest telehealth techniques to deliver patient education and music therapy to address mental health problems that lonely nursing home residents might experience. A portion of the grant will fund the salary of a position the university is calling “health equity and rural health fellow.” “The grants will enable the university to start a post-doctoral research training program,” said Dr. Hoai-An Truong, a UMES School of Pharmacy professor and its public health director. “It’s exciting.” Truong heads a team of UMES colleagues with expertise spanning public health, geriatric pharmacy, minority and rural health; Dr. James Bresette, Dr. Careen-Joan Franklin, Dr. Nkem Nonyel, Dr. Miriam Purnell, Nancy Rodriguez-Weller, Gregory Shaeffer and Dr. Seohwee Chloe Ahn. Truong said the pilot project calls for rural nursing home residents to be selected “based on previous or new diagnosis of depression prior to or during COVID-19 pandemic as well as those at-risk for depression due to social isolation.” Faculty researchers will use telehealth-delivered patient education – some with and some without music therapy – twice a week over eight weeks. A music therapist from Cambridge will work with Truong’s team. Together, they’ll be looking to “measure … improvement or alleviation of depression, with secondary outcomes such as improved quality of life, appropriate medications use and improve resident safety and health,” Truong said. UMES’ faculty-researchers will start the first phase of their pilot study at Salisbury’s Anchorage Healthcare Center. “We at Anchorage Healthcare Center are excited to be working with UMES to help better understand the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on our residents as well as, more importantly, how we can better help them out,” Anchorage administrator Joe Rose said. “I believe this is great opportunity to provide a much needed service that will have long lasting effects and I am grateful for UMES reaching out to us.” UMES also is working to formalize a similar agreement to partner with the Deer’s Head Hospital Center, also in Salisbury. ”Deer’s Head Hospital Center is excited to participate in this study,” chief executive officer Mary Beth Waide said. “We are patient-resident
focused and see this as an opportunity to improve the quality of care and the lives of those we serve.” The post-doctoral research training program will be supported by the Maryland Rural Health Association, the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy and the state health department’s Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities as its partners. Truong said the university will focus on gauging how the pandemic is affecting the mental health of underserved and vulnerable populations, especially health disparities experienced by (nursing home) residents of color. The Rural Maryland Council’s grant review board received nearly 180 proposals requesting a combined $14 million – roughly $6 million more than was available. “The selection process was extremely competitive,” the council wrote in its note to the UMES, and “the Board is pleased to be able to support your great efforts in rural Maryland.”
UMES researchers eye music therapy as an alternative to medication
UMES Gift
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UMES receives gift from Wallops’ contractor ASRC Federal donates $10,000 to engineer/aviation science program
ASRC Federal, a aviation science students. government services “One of our core contractor, is the latest values is stewardship, so private-sector partner to it’s important for us to be provide the University of a positive influence in the Maryland Eastern Shore communities where our with a donation to support employees live and work,” the engineering and said Felix, ASRC Federal aviation sciences program. president and CEO. UMES President “Our hope is that this (L-R) Former NASA astronaut Scott Altman, a vice president of ASRC Federal Heidi M. Anderson investment helps enable the joins company president/CEO Jennifer Felix in presenting a donation to and her leadership team next generation of leaders Dr. Heidi M. Anderson. State Del. Johnny Mautz was also on hand. recently accepted a in the greater Wallops $10,000 gift from an ASRC Federal delegation headed by Jennifer Felix, community.” the company’s president and chief executive officer, during an informal UMES alumni Christa Campbell and Bojiun “Andy” Tsao, who both reception at the Engineering and Aviation Science Complex. graduated in December 2019 with honors, work at Wallops and are ASRC Federal is a prime contractor at Wallops Flight Facility near among the approximately 8,000 employees across the ASRC Federal family Chincoteague, Va., a NASA facility where UMES students in the past have of companies. As a drafter, Tsao has created several parts for a payload gained hands-on experience as interns – and some have landed jobs. adaptor set to launch in 2021. Campbell is an aerospace engineer who UMES is one of 15 historically Black institutions with Accreditation already has designed parts for NASA’s Balloon Program Office and also is a Board for Engineering and Technology credentials, and is the state of facility safety officer. Maryland’s lone university with an aviation program that includes pilot President Anderson said, “the University values its relationship with training. private sector partners, and we are delighted to count ASRC Federal among Earlier this year, ASRC Federal had planned to host a golf tournament them. We anticipate that future UMES graduates will further enhance the to raise money for some of its philanthropic interests on the lower company’s important work.” Delmarva Peninsula, but the novel coronavirus pandemic derailed that ASRC Federal’s network of companies delivers digital operations event. and information technology modernization, software, applications and The company instead opted to make an unrestricted contribution analytics, engineering solutions, professional services and infrastructure of $10,000 to support instruction in UMES’ aviation and engineering operations to U.S. civil, defense and intelligence agencies in 44 states, disciplines. The university plans to use the money for scholarships for districts and territories.
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UMES President Heidi M. Anderson has been elected to a three-year term on the board of directors of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, “a Washington, D.C.based association of nearly 400 public colleges, universities and systems whose members” advance … “their regions’ economic progress and cultural development” through teaching, a commitment to underserved students and “a dedication to research and creativity.” The Key / November 2020
The University of Maryland Eastern Shore prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin, disability, marital status, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression. Inquiries regarding the application of Federal laws and non-discrimination policies to University programs and activities may be referred to the Office of Equity & Compliance/Title IX Coordinator by telephone (410) 651-7848 or e-mail (titleix@umes.edu).
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