ROCK HILL, SOUTH CAROLINA – Winthrop University Political Science Professor Adolphus Belk Jr. added another award this spring to his long list of achievements. He earned the Anna Julia Cooper Teacher of the Year Award given by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.
Belk’s department chair, colleagues and former students nominated him for the award, which recognizes recipients for demonstrated excellence in teaching, advising and mentoring of students. Belk received the award in March at the organization’s annual conference in Los Angeles, California.
Over the 2021-23 review period for the award, Belk taught 534 students across 19 classes and is known for being a tough, but fair, teacher. His department chair said he is adept at mentoring his students through the research and the scholarship process. He has collaborated with a former student, Lakeyta Bonnette-Bailey ’04, to write a book, entitled “For the Culture: Hip-Hop and the Fight for Social Justice,” and the two are now working on a second book, “Check the Rhyme: Political Rap Music and Racial Attitudes.”
A professor at Winthrop for 20 years, Belk is an excellent communicator who speaks at campus, community, state, regional and national events on multiple topics such as American politics, critical race theory, the Juneteenth celebration, hip-hop and the Civil War, to name a few. He has won all of the undergraduate faculty teaching awards at Winthrop and served as faculty conference chair and representative to the Board of Trustees.
“His entire career at Winthrop University, his teaching, research, and stewardship, center around the study of the important intersectional issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, diversity, equity and inclusion in the American political context, the African American experience and the African diaspora,” said Jennifer Disney, political science professor and chair of the Department of Political Science, Philosophy, Religion and Legal Studies.
Colleagues Nathaniel Frederick II, chair and associate professor of the Department of Mass Communication, and Jennifer Dixon-McKnight, assistant professor in history and African American Studies, wrote a letter to support the nomination. They praised Belk for mentoring them at Winthrop and as someone whose teaching philosophy is grounded in the idea that the student-professor relationship must be based on mutual respect and a shared responsibility for student intellectual development.
Three of Belk’s former students also wrote letters of support, two of whom are now attorneys and the third is a college professor. Willie Lyles III ’06, senior advisor and counsel in the U.S. House of Representatives, said Belk’s arrival at Winthrop helped change the campus in a positive way. Lyles, thinking he didn’t have much more to learn at the time, said Belk fostered his critical thinking skills and made him a better student and a better Black man. Lyles praised Belk for pairing his scholarship with activism and sharing his extensive expertise with a much broader community.
About the Anna Julia Cooper Award and the National Conference of Black Political Scientists
The Anna Julia Cooper Award is named for the fabled administrator and teacher of the M Street School and founder of Frelinghuysen University for adult education in Washington, D.C. Born in 1858 into a condition of enslavement, Cooper secured her Ph.D. in French from the Sorbonne.
The National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS) is organized to study, enhance and promote the political aspirations of people of African descent in the United States and throughout the world. It aims to contribute to the resolution of the many challenges that Black people confront. The organization promotes research in and critical analysis of topics usually overlooked and/or marginalized in political science scholarship. The organization believes that its scholarship must address wide-ranging, real-world issues and not the narrow, and often manufactured, concerns of the discipline.
The group has more than 400 active members representing colleges, universities, non-profit organizations, government relations and political campaign firms, and local, national, and state public sector agencies. Its collective membership teaches an estimated 1,000 undergraduate and graduate courses per year, with an average class size of 20 students, which amounts to contact with about 20,000 students.
For more information, contact Judy Longshaw, news and media services manager, at longshawj@winthrop.edu.
