First Black Professor at University of Missouri Dies at 82 - Higher Education: COLUMBIA, Mo. — A retired University of Missouri historian who broke racial barriers as the school’s first tenured Black professor has died.
The university announced Wednesday that Arvarh Strickland died on Tuesday. He was 82.
Strickland retired from the university in 1996 but remained active in Columbia as a community leader. The university honored him in 2007 by renaming what had been known as the General Classroom Building as Arvarh E. Strickland Hall.
Strickland joined the Missouri faculty in 1969 from Chicago State College. He grew up in rural Mississippi, attended Tougaloo College and earned his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Services for Strickland are scheduled for Saturday morning at Missouri United Methodist Church in Columbia, with internment at Memorial Park Cemetery.
