Barbara Omolade Dean of Multicultural Affairs

The itinerary of Barbara Omolade’s life has connected her with most of the socially relevant movements of the last 40 years. She has journeyed through civil rights activism, African-American cultural awakenings, early feminism, and the dawning era of women’s studies. Along the way, she has raised a family, earned two graduate degrees, taught college, done pioneering scholarship, home-schooled her son, converted to Christianity and co-founded a consultation of Afro-Christian scholars.

In January 2004, Barbara Omolade followed her life itinerary to Calvin as the college’s first dean of multicultural affairs. “She is perfect for the job. The only problem we had was to convince her of that!” said Calvin provost Joel Carpenter.

Born in 1942 in Brooklyn, N.Y., Omolade lived in Bedford Stuyvesant, “a very culturally rich African-American community,” where she attended one of the area’s oldest and largest African-American churches. “It was the hub of my social activities … . However, in reflection, I learned a lot about Christianity, but I don’t believe I ever understood the faith,” she said.

After a “wonderful experience” attending a predominantly white high school, Omolade opted for Queen’s College over a traditional black university, and her confidence and academic performance plummeted. “It was very silencing … . The history majors [her field of study] at that time were almost all male, and there were no black people — very, very few black people in the whole college. They didn’t have the kind of camaraderie I had in high school.”

Omolade found her voice in the emerging civil rights movement as a member of the NAACP and a staff member on the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, organizing students for the Mississippi Summer Project. (One of the students she recruited was civil rights martyr Andrew Goodman.) “I graduated from college in 1964, with every determination to be full time in the movement,” she said.

After devoting a few years to the movement — and living briefly in Haight Ashbury and on a kibbutz in Israel — Omolade married and became a mother.

Through motherhood, Omolade discovered her scholarly passion: “I was nursing my daughter at the time, and I wondered, ‘How did slave women mother?’ In the nascent era of both African-American historical studies and women’s studies, that question turned into research for a master’s thesis. “Roots had just come out … . I wanted to be like Alex Haley, but in African-American women’s history,” she said.

Omolade worked first for a feminist-run domestic violence center, then for the Women’s Action Alliance, an organization founded by Gloria Steinem.

By 1986, Omolade was a teacher, administrator, and mother to three teenagers and a younger child when her oldest daughter became a Christian. Her daughter’s newborn fire ignited her mother’s. In short order, Omolade became a Christian and — responding to God’s guidance — left administration for teaching and further graduate study.

“Before, when I taught, it was a lot about me. But afterwards I became really a true teacher. I became … a better teacher and true thinker. I became a teacher. Before I was an ideologue … . As a Christian, I became more sensitive to the fact I represented Christ as a scholar to them. I became conscious of being well prepared. I did more acts of servitude.”

As a Christian scholar, Omolade naturally gravitated to other Christian scholars. While reading Christianity Today, she came across an ad for Calvin College’s Summer Seminars in Christian Scholarship and felt a divine nudge. Responding to the title “God and Evil,” she enrolled in the seminar.

While listening to one of the seminar’s presenters speak on American religious history, Omolade asked a question about his neglect of Afro-Christian scholarship. It was, to then-seminar director Susan Felch, the most significant question of the six-week event.

Sensing Omolade’s unease at the seminar, Felch approached her about creating a community of African-American Christian scholars. The two collaborated on a consultation of Afro-Christian scholars, inviting a wish list of participants from across the country.

Now at Calvin as dean of multicultural affairs, she inherits the administration of a variety of programs directed at making Calvin a true multicultural institution. “My task is to coordinate, assess and sort of guide these programs.” Omolade will also work with faculty to bring a multicultural approach to curriculum and pedagogy.

“I think she will bring a fresh perspective and a new voice to what have become perhaps old issues and concerns for many. I think she will re-fuel our commitment for the goals that we have set as a college,” said Rhae Ann Booker, Calvin’s director of pre-college programs.

That doesn’t mean it won’t be a challenge, but her fans feel the new dean is up for the task. Says Felch: “As someone who believes in providence — and I don’t want to be glib about this — it would be hard to think of someone as suited to be the first dean of multicultural affairs of a major Christian college as Barbara is.”