History of CCSRE

Margarita Ibarra served as CCSRE’s Student Services Coordinator for 14 years, touching the lives of countless students and making CCSRE a warm, welcoming and supportive community. The CCSRE Community Building Award, which we give each year  to a graduating senior,  was established in 2011 to honor her memory.

Lyric McHenry, CCSRE class of  2016, cared deeply about the ways in which race and identity inform the world in which we live. She worked in social media industries, making them more accessible to communities of color and others excluded from representation or who lacked access to the means of production. Lyric modeled an inclusive openness to all people and had a luminous presence. Her name graces a new fellowship awarded by the Institute for Diversity in the Arts.

Dorothy Steele served as the  Inaugural Executive Director of the Center. Dorothy's life was centered around three guiding principles: love of family, creating a more just and fair society, especially for the most vulnerable of our children, and building community wherever she found herself. Each year since her passing in 2017, CCSRE gives an award in her name to 2 graduating seniors who carry on her commitment to community engagement and social justice.

From 1984 to his retirement in 2002, George Fredrickson was the Edgar  E. Robinson Professor of U.S. History at Stanford, an activist for racial justice and among the nation’s most eminent historians. He helped invent the field of comparative history through his brilliant study, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Few, if any, other historians have so imaginatively used a comparative approach to racism in America. CCSRE now presents the George Fredrickson award for the best essay by an undergraduate in the field on an annual basis.