Overview

Housed within the Division of Campus and Community Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, the Heman Sweatt Center Research Lab strives to create equitable access for Black males across the P-16 educational continuum. The Heman Sweatt Center Research Lab accomplishes this goal by publishing asset-oriented and humanizing research articles and briefs, centralizing research from the nation’s top scholars in a publicly accessible fashion, and developing the research skills of graduate and undergraduate students.  

Message

The highly visible image of the Black male in America is a frequent topic of scrutiny, conjecture, and opinion. But what does research into the reality of the Black male experience have to say? Helping scholars, journalists, and educators discover answers to that question is the goal of the Heman Sweatt Center Research Lab. More specifically, through our Black Male Education Research Collection (BMERC), we provide those looking for research-based answers with a centralized collection of peer-reviewed research from scholarly publications and interviews from  the nation’s top scholars on Black male education. The scholarly information curated by our research lab often provides a counter-narrative to the prevailing deficit-oriented beliefs about Black males in the United States of America. 

The Heman Sweatt Center Research Lab has collated research from the nation’s top scholars on issues related to Black males and the achievement gap, sport, gender identity, social justice, the school-to-prison pipeline and the criminal justice system. It is hoped that engagement with evidence-based inquiry and facts about Black males will inform the myriad discussions regarding these men and steer conversation toward truth about their experiences and needs.