- October 21, 2026
- By Rachael Grahame ’17
A $1 million gift from one of the first University of Maryland students to major in African American studies will uplift the department’s future.
Singleton McAllister, an attorney who worked for pioneering former congressman Parren J. Mitchell M.S. ’52, the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Agency for International Development, endowed a new professorship bearing her name in what is now the Department of African American and Africana Studies. It is the department’s first named professorship and the largest gift it has ever received.
“Educating the world about Africa today is extremely important, now more than ever before. Africa continues to shape global conversations and make contributions in a very positive way,” said McAllister. “I know that Harvard and other universities have spent a lot of resources in developing their African American studies programs, and I thought the professorship was a way in which I would be able to help the department bring in qualified scholars that have the wherewithal to enhance the program and make Maryland more competitive.”
Her gift supports Forward: The University of Maryland Campaign for the Fearless, a $2.5 billion fundraising initiative in support of expanding access to UMD's top-tier education, accelerating groundbreaking research and building stronger communities.
"The College of Behavioral and Social Sciences has much to thank Singleton McAllister for, from her nine years of service as a member of our BSOS Board of Visitors, to this incredibly generous gift to our Department of African American and Africana Studies,” said BSOS Dean Susan Rivera. “This gift comes at a critical time, and will serve a vital purpose: bolstering the abilities of existing faculty, and enabling the department to recruit additional talented minds in order to deliver the very best education and experiences to our students."
McAllister now sits on the University of Maryland College Park Foundation Board of Trustees. She earned dual degrees at UMD in African American studies and government and politics, recalling that the African American studies department’s first graduating class consisted of six or seven students and that she was the lone member of the department’s second graduating class.
“Since there weren’t a lot of us at the time, we were like a little family,” McAllister said.
With those peers, McAllister was part of the fledgling Black Student Union on campus and at The Black Explosion newspaper, where a colleague, DeWayne Wickham, suggested she consider interning in Mitchell’s office. Decades earlier, he had filed a discrimination lawsuit against the University of Maryland and was accepted as a full-time graduate student in the Department of Sociology in 1950. He went on to become the state of Maryland’s first African American congressman.
Mitchell offered McAllister a job as a legislative assistant after graduation, and she said working on Capitol Hill was a “phenomenal experience.”
In Mitchell’s office, she helped draft legislation to appropriate the first $25 million for the African Development Bank. She later became legislative director for U.S. Rep. William H. Gray (D-Pa.), helping him to draft legislation to create the African Development Foundation, whose advisory board she later served on for 10 years.
McAllister then earned a law degree from Howard University and served as federal district law clerk to the late Judge Jack E. Tanner and as senior counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Budget. President Clinton appointed her general counsel to USAID, representing 72 missions worldwide.
McAllister went on to work in the private sector; she is an attorney at Husch Blackwell LLP, where she is developing an Africa-focused practice within the firm that can work with clients on policy, regulatory, trade and project finance matters that cross borders.
“We are developing a good clientele, and there is so much opportunity with Maryland being an organization that can train young minds and broaden perspectives, I felt called to give back in this way,” McAllister said. “We live in a global society, and I want to make sure that Maryland is producing some brilliant and industrious students who can go out there and make a difference in our global community.”
Singleton B. McAllister