MIT 24-Hour Challenge 2025 presents:
Black History Project
MIT Black History Project
$13,310
raised by 116 people
$10,000 goal
About This Microchallenge
Black History Project Microchallenge
Challenge format
During the MIT 24-Hour Challenge, donors who make gifts to the MIT Clarence G. Williams Black History Project Fund will have their contributions matched up to $10,000.
About the Black History Project
Your gift to the MIT Clarence G. Williams Black History Project Fund will provide support for new aspects of a program with an innovative trajectory. What’s more, you will help pave the way for exciting future endeavors that will bolster diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at the Institute through a storytelling lens and commemorate Professor Williams’s trailblazing contributions.
The project has been an influential representation of the Black experience at MIT since its inception in 1995, including a book by Professor Williams―Technology and the Dream: Reflections on the Black Experience at MIT, 1941–1999―and a state-of-the-art website and numerous social media channels to further spread these stories.
MIT is publicizing this history further through a major exhibit at the MIT Museum, which opened its new space in fall 2022, to share these histories with the public in a new, highly visible way. Beyond visibility, the project is opening future avenues for research, developing tools to improve professional and academic relationships, and fostering academic methodologies around diversity, equity, and inclusion in the university setting.
Bolstered by the stories of the MIT Clarence G. Williams Black History Project, other endeavors will include but are not limited to a virtual toolkit to develop improved approaches and communication techniques around race; and a major MIT-funded research project based on Williams’s Bridge Leadership Concept, a model for increasing the presence of Black people and other underrepresented groups in higher education.
Thank you for considering a gift to the MIT Clarence G. Williams Black History Project Fund during the MIT 24-Hour Challenge on March 14. Each gift will be matched dollar for dollar. Beyond paying tribute to an extraordinary man who has served MIT and its greater community in multiple ways for decades, your gift will provide vital support for one of his most enduring projects at the Institute, enabling MIT to keep collecting and disseminating the stories that are critical to the Institute’s past, present, and future.