The Cosmos Club is proud to present the 58th Cosmos Club Award to Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, who led the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, for thirty years. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, he went to jail at twelve for participating in the historic Children’s March and soon discovered, as he put it, “how lonely a student of color can be in a classroom.”
At UMBC, he teamed up with Baltimore philanthropists to establish that Black students could excel in science in large numbers at a predominantly white university. That program has since produced more than 1,400 minority graduates in science and engineering. Tens of thousands of others around the country and the world, who may never have heard of him, can trace their success to the spread of Freeman A. Hrabowski’s dream.
