Skip to content

New Class Of Rhodes Scholars Includes Record Number Of Black Students

New Class Of Rhodes Scholars Includes Record Number Of Black Students

In the latest news of Black excellence, 10 Black students have been selected to attend the United Kingdom’s Oxford University for postgraduate studies, the most ever to receive the prestigious honor.

The scholarships are considered by many to be the most prestigious available to American students and cover all expenses for two or three years of study starting in October 2018. The winners were selected from a group of 866 applicants. According to the Rhodes Trust, the scholarships are worth about $68,000 per year.

Check out each scholar's accomplishments below:

Photo via: Army 

Simone Askew is the first Black woman to serve as captain of the Corps of Cadets, which is the highest position in West Point’s chain of command. Her international history undergraduate thesis examined rape as a tool for genocide.

Photo credit: Joe Angeles/Washington University

Jasmine Brown fights against implicit bias in laboratories and has done cancer research at the Broad Institute, pulmonary research at John Hopkins, behavioral science at the University of Miami and neuroscience at Washington University, where she is researching protective genes against cognitive defects following West Nile-induced encephalitis. She will earn her Ph.D. in physiology, anatomy and genetics at Oxford.

Camille A. Borders is an activist who advocated heavily during the protests in Ferguson, Mo. and founded Washington University Students in Solidarity to address police brutality and racial profiling. Her senior thesis investigated how slavery affected relationships and how African-American women understood and practiced their sexual lives post-slavery.

Photo credit: Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff

Tania N. Fabo is a Harvard senior in human development and regenerative biology. Fabo created the first Black Health Matters conference at Harvard. She has studied cancer throughout her college career and plans to study oncology at Oxford.

JaVaughn T. "J.T." Flowers graduated from Yale with a degree in political science. He started an organization that advocates for low-income students receiving an equal education and created a program that changed the university’s financial aid system.


Photo via: Temple University Photography 

Hazim Hardeman enrolled in Temple after transferring from a community college where he finished with high honors. Hardeman graduated from Temple magna cum laude and has studied and written about pedagogy, race and politics, gun control, hip-hop and African-American intellectual history. He also works as a Philadelphia substitute teacher.


Photo via: Emory University 

Chelsea A. Jackson helped revive Atlanta's chapter of the NAACP. She is pursuing a master at Emory University where her thesis will examine prosecutorial discretion and race. Jackson is also the musical director of AHANA A Capella.

Photo via: Hunter College 

Thamara V. Jean completed her senior thesis on the Black Lives Matter movement at the Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York. It was then published in the Journal of Politics and Society. She subsequently studied Black nationalism at Harvard during the 1960s.

Photo via: UMBC

Naomi T. Mburu plans to earn a D.Phil. in engineering science at Oxford. She won the 2016 National Society of Black Engineers Regional Conference Award for the best oral presentation, has given 11 research presentations, and co-authored two peer-reviewed journal articles. She is also the first student in the University of Maryland, Baltimore County's history to receive the Rhodes Scholarship. 

Photo via: Princeton University 

Jordan D. Thomas was a Fulbright Summer Institute fellow at the University of Bristol where he studied the culture, heritage and history of the U.K. He has also interned at the Office for Civil Rights' Program Legal Group at the U.S. Department of Education. He plans to study evidence-based social intervention and policy evaluation at Oxford.

Congratulations scholars on this incredible feat!