by Linsey Isaacs

With increasing efforts to incorporate the black perspective and history into a collegiate curriculum, about two-dozen professors across the country will participate in a specialized Harlem program this month, the AP reports.

College professors will embark on a three-week course at the  ”National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for College Teachers” at the university’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. The institute is designed to introduce them to archival research and involve them in historical debates with leading black scholars.

“Very rare will these participants have access to so many scholars like this at one time,” University of South Carolina history professor Patricia Sullivan, a co-director of the program, told the AP. “And they see very quickly that the Civil Rights movement didn’t start in the 1950s. There’s a whole history that is overlooked and it’s not just about black history. It’s American history.”

The intense program was founded by three historians in the mid-1900s, among them Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as a way to introduce information to professors of different disciplines. The information is particular to black civil rights stemming from the emancipation, and lasting until the 60s.

The program has spawned work on multiple projects including an anthology, and grown to teach new aspects of black history from a media standpoint. It’s helped professors, like English professor Cheryl Carpenter of Alabama A&T, introduce black literature in a creative way.

Elsewhere in Lexington, Ky., education professor Tiffany Wheeler has sought to propose new courses on race and inequality at Transylvania University, the AP reports, thanks to the program.

“At our fingertips were the most cutting-edge scholars,” said Wheeler. “This has been great.”