Hilliard, Asa G., III 1933–2007

(Asa Grant Hilliard, III, Asa Hilliard, III)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born August 22, 1933, in Galveston, TX; died of complications from malaria, August 13, 2007, in Cairo, Egypt. Educator, educational psychologist, and author. Hilliard once commented that he was a proponent of balance in education, but his own objective was to promote Afrocentrism (a focus on African and African-American achievements) among minority public school students. Hilliard worked briefly as a schoolteacher in Denver, Colorado, but he spent most of his career teaching others to teach. He taught education at San Francisco State University for nearly twenty years before settling in Atlanta. Georgia, in 1980, where he became the Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Urban Education at Georgia State University. As part of his commitment to urban and minority education, Hilliard was a founding member of the National Black Child Development Institute. He also worked as a consultant to textbook publishers on the identification of cultural bias in curriculum materials and criticized the inherent bias in standardized college admission tests. Hilliard wrote several books, including The Maroon within Us: Selected Essays on African American Community Socialization (1995), African Power: Affirming African Indigenous Socialization in the Face of the Culture Wars (2002), and Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement among African American Students (2003). He edited other works, such as The Teachings of Ptahhotep: The Oldest Book in the World (1995).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, August 17, 2007, sec. 2, p. 12.

Washington Post, August 16, 2007, p. B7.