Michael Lucius Lomax is an American educator and former elected official who has served as president and chief executive officer of the United Negro College Fund since 2004. From 1997 to 2004, he served as president of Dillard University, a historically Black university (HBCU). Lomax was elected as a member and then chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, the first African American elected official in history to lead a major county government in the State of Georgia.
Michael Lomax was born October 2, 1947, in Los Angeles, California, to Lucius W. Lomax, Jr. (1910-1973), an attorney, and Hallie Almena Davis Lomax (1915-2011), a journalist. [1] [2] His sister, Melanie E. Lomax, the Los Angeles civil rights lawyer, died in 2006.
Lomax attended Morehouse College at the age of sixteen years old, graduating magna cum laude in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in English [1] and minors in Spanish and history. He and three classmates were the first students inducted into Phi Beta Kappa at Morehouse. [3]
He went on to earn a master's degree in English literature at Columbia University in 1972, and a doctor of philosophy in American and African American studies from Emory University in 1984, where his doctoral dissertation topic was Countee Cullen, a Harlem Renaissance poet who was briefly married to the daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois. [1]
In 1969, Lomax joined Morehouse College as an English literature instructor. He served on the faculties of Morehouse College and Spelman College for 20 years. [1] [4]
From 1997 to 2004, Lomax served as president and professor of English and African world studies at Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana. [1] [5] [6] During his tenure at Dillard, student enrollment at the private HBCU increased by 49 percent, private funding by 300 percent and alumni giving more than 2,000 percent. In addition, President Lomax led an aggressive $60 million campus renovation program to improve the living and learning environment for Dillard students. [7]
Lomax began his career as an Atlanta public servant in the 1970s. He held several positions, including director of research and special assistant to Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, the city's first African American mayor, and established Atlanta's Office of Cultural Affairs. [8] [9]
In 1978, Dr. Lomax ran for public office and was elected to the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. Two years later, he was elected chairman of the board, becoming the first African American to lead a major county government in Georgia. He served as board chairman for 12 years, [1] overseeing a $500 million annual operating budget and 5,000 county employees. As a commissioner, he helped bring the 1988 Democratic National Convention and the 1996 Olympic Games to Atlanta. He also spearheaded a number of major construction projects, including building Georgia's Interstate 400, expanding and renovating historic Grady Hospital and constructing the new Fulton County government center. He also founded the Fulton County Arts Council, the National Black Arts Festival, [10] and served as commissioner of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs in Atlanta. [11] [3]
In 1989 and 1993, he was an unsuccessful candidate for mayor of Atlanta. [1] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16]
Since 2004, Lomax has served as president and chief executive officer of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), the largest private provider of scholarships and other educational support to underrepresented students. [1] He launched UNCF's Institute for Capacity Building, which supports member HBCUs to become stronger, more effective and self-sustaining. Under his leadership, UNCF has raised over $5 billion, helping more than 200,000 students earn college degrees and launch careers. In 2023, UNCF was named one of America’s Top 100 Charities. [1]
Annually, UNCF's work enables 50,000 students to go to college with UNCF scholarships and attend its 37-member HBCUs. [17] [18] [19] Lomax oversees the organization's 400-plus scholarship programs, which award more than 10,000 scholarships a year; the six-year undergraduate graduation rate for UNCF scholarship recipients is greater than the U.S. college students total. [1]
In addition, Lomax has negotiated public and private partnerships to advance HBCUs goals. In 2023, UNCF received a $190 million gift from Fidelity Investments, [1] and in 2024, UNCF received a $100 million unrestricted grant from the Lilly Endowment to support the organization's $1 billion capital campaign. [20] The gift is the largest donation in UNCF's history and expands the pooled endowment for its 37 member HBCU institutions. [20] [21]
Lomax was the keynote speaker for the 154th Commencement Convocation at Benedict College, a UNCF member institution. [22]
He serves on the boards of Handshake, the KIPP Foundation, Cengage Group and Teach for America. He is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Senate, a member of Alpha Phi Alpha and Sigma Pi Phi fraternities, a trustee of the Studio Museum in Harlem and a founding member of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which he was appointed to by U.S. Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert. U.S. President George W. Bush appointed Lomax to the President's Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
He is a past board member of America's Promise Alliance, The Carter Center and Emory University.
In 2018, Dr. Lomax received the Dr. Eugene D. Stevenson, Jr. Lifetime Achievement Award from the Higher Education Leadership Foundation (H.E.L.F.), the highest honor bestowed by the foundation. [23] Lomax received Emory University's most prestigious alumni honor, the Emory Medal, in 2004. He also received the Omicron Delta Kappa Laurel Crowned Circle Award, the organization's highest honor, Morehouse's Bennie Achievement Award and 17 honorary degrees.
Lomax has three daughters, Michele, Rachel and Deignan and 5 grandchildren.
He is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha and Sigma Pi Phi fraternities. Lomax was also inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa in 2000 at Dillard.
UNCF, the United Negro College Fund, also known as the United Fund, is an American philanthropic organization that funds scholarships for black students and general scholarship funds for 37 private historically black colleges and universities. UNCF was incorporated on April 25, 1944, by Frederick D. Patterson, Mary McLeod Bethune, and others. UNCF is headquartered at 1805 7th Street, NW in Washington, D.C. In 2005, UNCF supported approximately 65,000 students at over 900 colleges and universities with approximately $113 million in grants and scholarships. About 60% of these students are the first in their families to attend college, and 62% have annual family incomes of less than $25,000. UNCF also administers over 450 named scholarships.
Morehouse College is a private historically Black, men's, liberal arts college in Atlanta, Georgia. Anchored by its main campus of 61 acres (25 ha) near Downtown Atlanta, the college has a variety of residential dorms and academic buildings east of Ashview Heights. Along with Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, and the Morehouse School of Medicine, the college is a member of the Atlanta University Center consortium.
Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are institutions of higher education in the United States that were established before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the intention of primarily serving African Americans. Most of these institutions were founded during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War and are concentrated in the Southern United States. They were primarily founded by Protestant religious groups, until the Second Morill Act of 1890 required educationally segregated states to provide African American, public higher-education schools in order to receive the Act's benefits.
Spelman College is a private, historically Black, women's liberal arts college in Atlanta, Georgia. It is a founding member of the Atlanta University Center academic consortium. Founded in 1881 as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, Spelman awarded its first college degrees in 1901 and is the oldest private historically Black liberal arts institution for women.
Hamilton E. Holmes was an American orthopedic physician. He and Charlayne Hunter-Gault were the first two African-American students admitted to the University of Georgia. Additionally, Holmes was the first African-American student to attend the Emory University School of Medicine, where he earned his M.D. degree in 1967, later becoming a professor of orthopedics and associate dean at the school.
The Atlanta University Center Consortium is a collaboration between four historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in southwest Atlanta, Georgia: Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, Morehouse College, and the Morehouse School of Medicine. It is the oldest and largest contiguous consortium of African-American higher education institutions in the United States. The consortium structure allows for students to cross-register at the other institutions in order to attain a broader collegiate experience. They also share the Robert W. Woodruff Library, a dual degree engineering program, and career planning and placement services and the AUC Data Science Initiative.
Audrey Forbes Manley is an American pediatrician and public health administrator. Manley was the first African-American woman appointed as chief resident at Cook County Children's Hospital in Chicago (1962). Manley was the first to achieve the rank of Assistant Surgeon General in 1988 and later served as the eighth president of Spelman College.
Frederick Douglass Patterson was an American academic administrator, the president of what is now Tuskegee University (1935–1953), and founder of the United Negro College Fund. He was a 1987 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, and 1988 recipient of the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.
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Robert Michael Franklin Jr. is an American author, theologian, ordained minister, and academic administrator who served as the tenth president of Morehouse College from 2007 to 2012. Franklin is a visiting scholar in residence at Stanford University's Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute. In January 2014, he became director of the religion program at the Chautauqua Institution.
The African-American upper class, sometimes referred to as the black upper class, the black upper middle class or black elite, is a social class that consists of African-American individuals who have high disposable incomes and high net worth. The group includes highly paid white-collar professionals such as academics, engineers, lawyers, accountants, doctors, politicians, business executives, venture capitalists, CEOs, celebrities, entertainers, entrepreneurs and heirs.
The Black Ivy League refers to a segment of the historically black colleges (HBCUs) in the United States that attract the majority of high-performing or affluent black students.
Hallie Almena Lomax was an African American journalist and civil rights activist.
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Robert Frederick Smith is an American billionaire businessman and philanthropist. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of private equity firm Vista Equity Partners. He graduated from Cornell University with a chemical engineering degree and from Columbia Business School with an MBA, before working as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. In 2019, while delivering the commencement speech at Morehouse College, Smith pledged to pay off the entire $34 million of student loan debt of all of the members of the 2019 graduating class.
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Samuel DuBois Cook was a political scientist, professor, author, administrator, human rights activist, and civil servant. Cook is best known for serving as the first African-American faculty member at Duke University, in 1966, as well as serving as the President of Dillard University from 1975 to 1997. In addition to these accomplishments, Cook was also appointed to the National Council on the Humanities by President Jimmy Carter and the United States Holocaust Memorial Council by President Bill Clinton. Furthermore, he also served as the first black president of the Southern Political Science Association.