Rev. Forrest Pritchett honored by the NAACP

Rev. Forrest Pritchett

Inside the Core this week, we are thrilled that long-time faculty member, friend and supporter of the Core, Rev. Forrest Pritchett, is being honored at the Oranges and Maplewood, NAACP Branch group’s Freedom Fund Dinner and Awards, on Thursday, October 19, 2023 at the Cedar Hill Country Club in Livingston. Rev. Pritchett is receiving the President’s Award. This honor is well-deserved, and several of us who teach in the Core will be attending.

Rev. Dr. Forrest M. Pritchett is a long-time civil rights activist, mentor, and adviser. After graduation from Delaware State University, with a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for promising future university professors, this Atlantic City native, studied Sociology at the New School for Social Research. With fifty-four years of experience in higher ed, including forty-five at Seton Hall, he currently serves as the director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Program and as a professor in Africana Studies and the University Core. Not only does he teach regularly in the Core, but he serves officially on the Core Advisory Board and unofficially as a friend and mentor to the Director and other colleagues. We regularly co-sponsor events with Rev. Pritchett and the MLK Leadership Program, including what has now become an annual event – Romero-King Week, where we honor St. Oscar Romero and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. with two vigils on the green, one on the anniversary of Romero’s assassination on March 24, 1980 and the other on King’s assassination on April 4, 1968. Between the two events we make films about the two martyrs available to faculty and students and sometimes have an additional speaker. Another very important event, co-sponsored by the MLK Leadership Program, the University Core, and the Law School, was the talk given by Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy and famed founder of the Equal Justice Initiative on November 7, 2021. Stevenson received an honorary doctorate from Seton Hall during the program.

Rev. Pritchett recalls similarly meaningful occasions in the past. For example, he remembers having the two eldest daughters of Rev. King and Malcolm X perform a dance together at Seton Hall many years ago. Throughout his decades at Seton Hall, he functioned as the former Interim Director of Africana Studies; Senior Adviser to the Provost for diversity, equity, and inclusion; Assistant Dean of the Black Studies Center; a faculty mentor in Freshman Studies, an adjunct professor in the departments of Interdisciplinary Studies, Religious Studies, and the program director of the Seton Hall Gospel Choir. He is known well for coordinating the annual MLK, Jr. Day Symposium, which provides academic credit and perspectives on racism, privilege, and justice while educating students and teachers on the leadership principles of MLK as a civil rights activist. The MLK program at Seton Hall is among the oldest such programs in the United States. He doubled the size of the MLK Leadership Program to eighty students. Each participant receives a $6,000+ scholarship.

Rev. Pritchett and student athlete Alexis Lewis honored at game

Because he is someone who has inspired generations of Pirates through his many roles and has contributed greatly to numerous campus organizations, the University continues to embrace Rev. Pritchett as a servant leader and a pillar amongst the campus community. He has helped in many ways to challenge the University to be and do better. In 2003 he received Seton Hall’s highest honor, the McQuaid medal. More recently, he was honored at a Pirates Game, along with student athlete Alexis Lewis, for a Great Minds of the Game Program, on Feb. 24, 2020. He and his wife Rev. Barbara Pritchett were trained by the King Center in Kingian nonviolence. His nonprofit agency development work includes childcare, reading, rites of passage, inter-faith collaboration and support services to the families of the incarcerated. He is a frequent lecturer in the prison system. In 2016 he received the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cooperation for National and Community Service and Office of the President of the United States, President Barack Obama.

One of the many benefits of knowing Rev. Pritchett is that his memory reaches back to the crucial early days of the civil rights movement. A member of SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), he participated in protests while a young college student, activity that, at first, worried his mother greatly, until she had her own “journey of transformation” and became a protestor herself. Throughout the dangers of those days, Rev. Pritchett recalls that it was only through his faith that he found the strength to keep going.

We are very grateful that Rev. Pritchett continues the work he began as a young civil rights activist in his many roles here at Seton Hall, where he still seasons everything he does with faith and prayer. We in the Core celebrate this honor bestowed on our friend and hope he continues for many more years as a servant leader of faculty, administrators, and students.