Parker receives Jefferson Award, one of UNC’s highest honors

Patricia Parker, the Ruel W. Tyson Jr. Distinguished Professor and director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, was awarded the Thomas Jefferson Award, one of UNC’s highest faculty honors, last fall.

The Jefferson Award is awarded annually to a faculty member who has “best exemplified the ideals and objectives of Thomas Jefferson,” whose complex legacy includes the values of democracy, public service and the pursuit of knowledge.

Two weeks before Parker received the award, she visited Monticello, Jefferson’s estate in Virginia, and took the “From Slavery to Freedom” tour.

As a Black woman and a descendant of enslaved ancestors, Parker wanted a glimpse of what life was like for the nearly 400 Black men, women and children Jefferson enslaved there, including Sally Hemings, the mother of four Jefferson children.

Still thinking about her trip when she returned to Chapel Hill, Parker accepted the Jefferson Award in honor of Hemings and of civil rights trailblazer Ella Baker.

Parker has long been influenced by the leadership of Baker, a North Carolinian and early architect of the civil rights movement who used a grassroots approach to empower people. Throughout her academic career, Parker, former chair of the department of communication, has studied and written books about the late Baker’s method of “servant leadership,” and she founded the Ella Baker Women’s Center for Leadership and Community Activism in 2007.

Read a longer version of this story by Michael Lananna, University Communications