Forever in the Path: The Black Experience at Michigan State University offers a sweeping overview of the Black experience at America’s first agricultural college from the 1890s through the late twentieth century. In exploring the personalities, important events, and key turning points of Black life at the university, this book deftly blends intellectual history, social history, educational history, institutional history, and the African American biographical tradition. Pero G. Dagbovie depicts and imagines how his numerous subjects’ upbringings and experiences at the institution informed their futures, and how they benefitted from and contributed to MSU’s vision, mission, and transformative role in the history of higher education.
Michigan State University—founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan—has a fascinating past, a history shaped by vacillating local and national contexts as well as by people from different walks of life. The first Black students arrived on campus during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the first full-time Black faculty member was hired in the late 1940s. Before and after the modern Civil Rights Movement, African Americans from various backgrounds were transformed by MSU while also profoundly contributing in vital ways to the institution’s growth and evolving identity.

Pero G. Dagbovie is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of History, the vice provost for graduate and postdoctoral studies, and dean of the Graduate School at Michigan State University. His scholarship centers on African American history, twentieth-century U.S. history, the history of the U.S. historical profession, and the philosophy of history. He has authored seven books and numerous articles and essays, is the former editor of the Journal of African American History, and is on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, including Michigan Historical Review, Modern American History, Journal of Black Studies, and Journal for the Study of Radicalism. Active in public history, Dagbovie served as a scholar consultant for the And Still We Rise permanent exhibit at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Organization of American Historians, and the National Park Service’s National Capital Region History Program (Northeast Capital Parks—East). He has also served as a consultant for history and social studies curriculum development with public school systems in Michigan and has led numerous teaching history workshops and summer institutes for secondary-school history teachers.