By: E&P Staff Filmmaker Spike Lee has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to begin a sports journalism program at Morehouse College, the nation's only all-male historically black college.
Lee, an alumnus of the Atlanta school, told the World Entertainment News Network, that he wanted to help change what he called a "dearth of representation of African Americans" among sports journalists.
"Seventy-five per cent of the players in the NFL (National Football League) are black, an even higher number of African Americans play basketball, but, if you look in the press box and the magazines and the newsrooms, you don't have that representation now, so that's what we want to do," Lee told the network.
Morehouse will start the program in the spring as a concentration inside the English department, with the idea of expanding the program into a minor and, later, a major, Richard Prince reported in his Journal-isms notebook on the Maynard Institute's Web site. Initially, the English department is grouping several existing courses together with a goal of attracting 25 students to the concentration, the school said.
The school is in the process of recruiting a director for the sports journalism program.
Lee, director of "Do the Right Thing" and "Malcolm X," sits on the Morehouse board of trustees.
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