The IU School of Education recently celebrated the legacy of Elder Watson Diggs, the first African American to graduate with a degree in education from Indiana University, with a symposium that explored issues surrounding the future of education given recent and anticipated court decisions and legislation around access and diversity.

The symposium was a collaboration between the School of Education and Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity and Foundation. Diggs was one of the founders of Kappa Alpha Psi in 1911.

With sessions that discussed a wide range of topics, including how teachers could create anti-racist classrooms to recruiting Black males to become teachers, JC Campbell, a Ph.D. student in Higher Education and Student Affairs and organizer of the event, said his goals for the symposium were to educate the campus on Kappa Alpha Psi, the legacy of Elder Watson Diggs, and to financially support students in the School of Education.

That support is evident through the two students who are recipients of this year’s Elder Watson Diggs Scholarship, Eric Agyemang-Dua Jr. and Diamond Jackson. Agyemang-Dua Jr. is pursuing an M.S.Ed in Mental Health Counseling.

“Receiving the Elder Watson Diggs Scholarship serves as an empirical certainty that the work I'm doing around counseling and social innovation, that the mission I'm carrying, is very meaningful and impactful. It serves as an extra push, an extra cheering on, and an extra ‘you're almost there Eric, just keep moving forward,’” he said. 

Agyemang-Dua Jr. found the most significant part of the symposium was “feeling that sense of support and encouragement around my aspirations to be a collegiate professor.”

Jackson is a secondary education major with a concentration in English and worked at the symposium as part of her job within the Office Of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. 

“I was happy to see Elder Watson Diggs be appreciated for the work that he did when he was at IUB. As an African American woman, it makes me feel happy and allows me to still feel hope for my brown sisters and brothers and that we can do anything that we put our minds to and within being educators as well,” she said. 

For Jackson, the Elder Watson Diggs scholarship has allowed her a chance to breathe: “This scholarship has helped because as a freshman, I been trying to budget and pay of my debt for the fall semester at IUB. The scholarship took majority of my debt away that I had (and) I was finally able to focus more on my studies and classes as a student and spend more time less worrying about how I will make ends meet financially.”

Visitors walking through the Wright building will be able to remember Diggs further with a portrait that was unveiled during the weekend of the symposium. The portrait was commissioned as part of the Bridging the Visibility Gap initiative and in partnership with Kappa Alpha Psi. 

It was all highly personal for Leslie Bassett, Diggs’s great-niece.

Stewardship of the village to raise, educate and support students, to me, is Elder W. Diggs’s greatest legacy. Certainly it extends to protecting the staff, partners and families. You can’t have one without the other. To see the Kappa Alpha Psi ‘Brethren,’ passionate, committed, eloquent men culturally centering and socializing the educational careers of students here and nationwide was awesome,” Bassett said, adding, “Meeting the first scholarship recipients and young Kappas touched my heart. The innocence and the power in those young faces teaches us to hold our dreams closely and continue. Dr. Marcus Croom, the keynote speaker, and all of the speakers I heard, lay out the possibilities and the blueprint for serious people to do essential work.”

When viewing her great-uncle’s portrait, Bassett said, “The unveiled portrait, the holy artist, the expression by the visionaries who sired its creation, brought immediate tears. We are created in the image and likeness of Divine Source, and words speak power into existence. This is a sacred time. Thank you for teaching me more than I knew and for giving me the fire and fuel to teach it to my progeny.”

Several sessions from the symposium are available to watch on our website.