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Many notable African American students, faculty and staff have made indelible marks at ����AV. As we acknowledge Black History Month, and celebrate Mason’s 50^th anniversary, here are just a few:

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Kim Crabbe
Social Work 1984-87

Crabbe played right fullback for the Mason women’s soccer team that won the 1985 NCAA Division I title, and was the first African American to be called up to the U.S. Women’s National Team.

The Reston, Virginia, native played in the first Women’s Olympic Festivals, numerous National Cups, the W-League and at the professional level. Crabbe is still very involved with soccer on the grassroots level.

In addition to her work as director of programming/outreach with the Wilmington (N.C.) Hammerheads, where she coaches and mentors underserved youth, Crabbe runs a nonprofit, Outreach of Cape Fear, that continues those efforts. In appreciation for her community service, she received the 2019 Centennial NAACP Youth Services Award and was honored by the United Soccer Coaches as the 2021 Youth Coach of the Year.

“My goal every day is to impact one person,” Crabbe said. “The sport has given so much to me, I want to give something back to the sport and, more importantly, the youth within our community.”

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Spencer Crew
Robinson Professor, 2008-present

Crew believes that personal stories are at the heart and soul of public history, and has made a career of making those stories available and accessible to the public on the nation’s largest stages.

Crew worked for 20 years at the National Museum of American History, including nine as its director, becoming the first African American to head a major Smithsonian Institution museum.

His most important exhibition was the groundbreaking “Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration 1915–1940,” which generated a national discussion about migration, race, and creating historical exhibitions. He also co-curated “The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden,” which is one of the Smithsonian’s most popular exhibitions.��

From July 2019 to September 2020, Crew was interim director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. And for six years he served as president of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

— Listen to his podcast with Mason President Gregory Washington.

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Andrew Evans
Admissions officer, 1974-85

Evans was hired in 1974 as Mason’s first African American admissions officer, and was tasked with recruiting minority applicants. During his first year, enrollment of African American students at Mason doubled.

One of the changes for which Evans pushed was to adjust academic standards for minority applicants, a move that—at first—was met with criticism, which receded when students showed they could do college-level work.

In an oral history interview conducted by the University Libraries Special Collections Research Center in 2012, Evans said of former Mason President Vergil H. Dykstra and Robert C. Krug, “What’s great about them is that they gave us total support. They gave us the green light to say, ‘I got your back.’ ”

Evans, who grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, described his style as that of a salesman on campus, a campaign manager, and an ambassador, because he needed support for his efforts.

“My approach when I came into Mason, the themes I put in my head, was how to thrive in a diverse community,” Evans said in his oral history. “And I thought, if you’ve got a different culture here and you can get Black students to understand that all these differences, learn from it, get involved in it, feel it, because these are some of the same people you’re going to be working with. So I had this whole thing about thriving in a diverse community, and you can make it.”

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Helon Habila��

Professor, Creative Writing, 2007-present����

An acclaimed, internationally known writer, Habila was raised in Nigeria. He studied at the University of Jos in Nigeria and the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. ��

His writing has won many prizes, including the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2001; the Commonwealth Writers Prize (African region), 2003; the Emily Balch Prize in 2008; and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2015.����

In 2005, he was invited to be the first Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College in New York. He spent a year writing and teaching at Bard, after which he came to Mason.����

Additionally, he is a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review.��

His fourth novel, “Travelers,” examines the African diaspora in Europe.

“By the end, you feel as though you, too, are seeing what Europe means afresh: its racism, its confusion, its attraction, its incoherence, its safeties,” Edward Docx wrote in a review in The Guardian. “But you are also full of stories of African conflict, dispossession and human suffering. Again and again, Habila asks the deepest questions about the relationship of Europe to Africa and Africa to Europe. And with great skill, he makes the unfamiliar familiar and vice versa. What more can you ask of a novel?”

Marilyn Mobley

Associate Professor, English, 1988-2007

Mobley founded Mason’s African and African American Studies program in 1992, and was one of the founding faculty members of the Cultural Studies Program. She was a member of the Diversity Research Group and served as associate provost of educational programs from 2003 to 2007 before becoming provost at Bennett College.

A founding member and former president of the Toni Morrison Society while at Mason, Mobley has used the writing of the Nobel Prize-winning author, who examined the Black experience, as the primary subject of her teaching and scholarship. An author of several books and numerous articles and reviews, Mobley’s forthcoming book is “Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing: Re-imagining Spaces for the Reader.”��

Mobley received the Margaret Howell Outstanding Achievement Award from Mason for work in diversity and inclusion, and the first Sojourner Truth Award for scholarship and leadership at the intersection of race and gender. She also was recognized with awards from the Virginia Council of the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. ��

At Case Western University, Mobley served as inaugural vice president for inclusion, diversity and equal opportunity for 10 years before retiring as an emerita professor of English and African American Studies in June 2021. She is now an ordained minister serving as an associate pastor at Arlington Church of God in Akron, Ohio.��

Jeffrey C. Stewart

Professor, History, 1986-2006

Stewart’s work chronicling the life of civil rights champion Paul Robeson, America’s first politically engaged performing artist, distinguished Stewart at Mason and included a book, “Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen,” and an exhibition of Robeson’s life in photographs in one of Mason’s Fine Arts Galleries.

A gifted curator, Stewart produced two major exhibitions with accompanying scholarly catalogs: “To Color America: Portraits by Winold Reiss” at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, and “Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen,” which toured nationally.

Now a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara, Stewart won the 2018 National Book Award and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for his book, “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke.”

“Professor Stewart helped me to understand the complexities of the past and how much the past was still with us in the present,” said George Oberle, BA History ’96; MA History ’99; PhD History ’16, a historian librarian at Mason and Mason alum ��“His intellectual rigor was inspirational to me. I am forever grateful to have been his student.”

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Darius Lee Swann

Faculty, Philosophy and Religious Studies, 1971-1984

Swann joined Mason in 1971 and was one of only three African American faculty members at the time.

In 1974, Swann was named special assistant to the president for minority affairs by then-Mason President Vergil H. Dykstra. He was the first Mason faculty member whose sole job revolved around assisting minority students.

Swann believed Black students at Mason did not need more academic help than White students; they just needed a reason to be excited about being part of the university. Swann encouraged Black students to start clubs and ask for more Afro-centric courses and programs.

With Swann’s leadership, the university created the Office of Minority Student Affairs, which mentored Black and other minority students and developed academic and cultural programs. The office was a precursor to today’s Center for Culture, Equity, and Empowerment.

Swann, who died in 2020, was the plaintiff in the 1965 federal court case Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education. The case, which centered on school integration in Charlotte, North Carolina, went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971, with the court ruling in Swann’s favor.

— Information provided by the Mason Legacies program

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Walter E. Williams

Professor, Economics, 1980-2020

Williams served Mason’s academic community with distinction as a free-market economist, scholar, author, and as a nationally known syndicated columnist until his death at age 84.

His principal scholarly research was devoted to studying the effects of markets and government policies on minority groups, and he challenged orthodox ideas on economics, race relations and the role of government. His 1982 book, “The State Against Blacks,” is a classic contribution to that research.

Williams’ belief that unimpeded free-market capitalism could solve many social ills typically thought solvable only by government intervention made him a headliner in conservative and libertarian circles. He was an occasional substitute host on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show.��

The author of 11 books, and dozens of academic articles and essays, Williams was called “a scholar’s scholar” by Mason economics colleagues Donald Boudreaux and Daniel Houser.

— Explore more of .

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Roger Wilkins

Robinson Professor, 1986-2007

One of Mason’s most well-respected professors, by both his colleagues and students, Wilkins was a nationally known civil rights champion and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Washington Post.

After he died at age 85 in 2017, Wilkins Plaza, in the center of the Fairfax Campus, was named for him. The plaza is also home to the Enslaved People of George Mason Memorial.

Wilkins worked diligently to hold America accountable to its constitutional ideals. He was an intern to Thurgood Marshall, then director-council of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, and later a Supreme Court Justice. At age 33, Wilkins became the nation’s first African American assistant attorney general and made matters of race and poverty central to his work.

He served Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and helped pass the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was among the first African American editorial writers at both The Washington Post and The New York Times. Wilkins’ powerful editorials about the Watergate scandal helped earn him a share of the Post’s 1973 Pulitzer Prize for public service.

— Read remembrances of Wilkins’ time at Mason.

Irma R. Willson

BA Social Welfare ’73

Willson was committed to improving life on campus and regularly called attention to the discrimination and obstacles she experienced in her original application to George Mason College. Once admitted, Willson brought her concerns to George Mason College leaders, who originally dismissed her. She was quoted in the student newspaper, the Broadside, on the prejudiced administrative decisions she endured.

A tireless social campaigner, Willson in April 1971 testified in a public forum on race relations at George Mason College that was hosted by the Virginia State Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Her words of protest were published, without attribution, in the Virginia State Advisory Committee final report, titled, “George Mason College: For All the People?”

Willson also contributed to the wider Fairfax community. As part of her coursework, she helped administer a survey to surrounding disadvantaged communities in partnership with the Fairfax Community Action Plan.

— Information provided by the Mason Legacies project.

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David Verburg

Sport Management ’13

Verburg was an 11-time All-American, a two-time Colonial Athletic Association male athlete of the year, and the first Mason track athlete to win Olympic gold.

Verburg’s gold came at the 2016 Rio Olympics as part of the United States’ 4x400-meter relay team. Verberg ran the anchor leg in a heat that advanced the team to the final, but missed the championship race because of plantar fasciitis in both feet and a torn tendon in his right foot, injuries that took two and a half months to heal.

Verburg hopes to return to the Olympics in 2024 in Paris, but in a different sport, rugby, and has played for a developmental team in Atlanta and on the pro level with the Loonies of the Premier Rugby Sevens league.

The Lynchburg, Virginia, native, now lives in Houston, where he is a personal athletic performance coach. He is co-founder of Healthy Kidz Club ATL, a nonprofit dedicated to helping kids ages 5-18 live healthier lifestyles, and also started the Golden Tortoise Foundation, which focuses on finding homes for turtles and tortoises, and placing turtle crossing signs in heavily congested areas.

— Watch Verburg tell Ellen Degeneres how he .

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