Students display their scholarship awards at the Woodson Williams Marshall Association and UM Black Alumni Society Scholarship Reception. Among the those joining the students in the group photo were UM President Donna E. Shalala (front row, fifth from left); School of Education professor Robert F. Moore (back row, far right); Hurricanes linebacker coach Micheal Barrow (front row, left); and Phyllis Tyler, president of the UM Black Alumni Society (front row, far right).

The evening’s more than 120 attendees chuckled as the featured alumni speaker confessed that as a kid growing up in Homestead, Florida, he had a big head, big feet, and a small body. Back then, he added, when he told people his dream—to play football—they laughed at him outright.

But Micheal Barrow, a 1993 alumnus of the University of Miami School of Business Administration, made sure they weren’t laughing long. Read the full story

Prior to his lecture, Benjamin Chavis talks with, from left, students Arlesa Hubbard, co-chair of UM’s 2012 MLK Celebration Committee, and Dara Collins, president of United Black Students, which helped bring Chavis to campus; Renee Dickens Callan, director of Multicultural Student Affairs; and student Yasmin Assar, MLK Committee co-chair.

Much older today but still consumed with a youthful passion for equality and justice, noted civil rights leader Benjamin Chavis Jr. stood behind a podium inside the University of Miami’s Newman Alumni Center on January 18 and recounted for an audience of mostly 19- to 21-year-olds one of the little-known facts that defined the character of Martin Luther King Jr.

So concerned was King that the shoes worn by some protesters on one of his long freedom marches had begun to wear out that he purchased new ones for them, allowing them to continue their trek. Read the full story

With women’s boxing set to debut at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien gave a University of Miami audience a look at the changing face of the sport, screening her latest documentary, In Her Corner: Latino in America 2, at the UM Fieldhouse on September 12. Read the full story