Guest speaker William Gipson visited ULM to talk with students about how black history impacted his life.

Gipson is the associate vice provost for equity and access at the University of Pennsylvania.

He creates opportunities for first generation, low income and unrepresented students. He has a passion for helping students and improving education, and it all started with his love for black history.

Gipson is a former ULM student and said that his experience here had a great impact on where he is now.

“What happened in this location changed my life,” Gipson said.

Gipson attended Carroll High School in Monroe where he became curious about black history after discovering how little of it was in the school’s textbooks.

“The history books were outdated and only had one chapter of black history of which was about slavery,” Gipson said.

Gipson’s curiosity of black history carried over to his college years, but his curiosity soon turned into a passion after taking a particular college course.

“I took a psychology course here at ULM, and it talked about developmental tasks of late adolescence, and one of the central tasks is to come to a sense of your identity,” Gipson said.

After his experience with that class, Gipson decided that it was important to know who he really was. He wanted to understand what it meant to be a black man in America.

Gipson’s eagerness to know his identity led him to extensive research about the history of black people. He began to immerse himself in books about black people.

In Gipson’s speech, he quoted Tony Marson who said: “American History itself is incoherent without an understanding of African American History.”

Calvin Stafford, a psychology graduate student, said that he enjoyed the event and Gipson’s speech.

“It was great. I loved his speech and he gave a lot of great information,” Stafford said.

Kris Bista, an educational research professor, also enjoyed Gipson’s speech and said what he took from Gipson’s speech is to stay focused on a goal and never stop going for it.