When Paul Adamsbaum was in college in the late 60s and early 70s in New York, he had a job delivering LPs and 45s to record stores throughout the city. Visiting as many as a dozen stores a day, he got to know the neighborhoods, their music and the people who frequented the stores. There was Latin and Caribbean music in the Bronx, blues, gospel and soul in Harlem, jazz and salsa in Lower Manhattan and Motown in Brooklyn. Befriending the music shop owners, he learned about the opportunities they had and the challenges they faced in their communities.
In the 1990s, Adamsbaum fell in love with Tucson during a golf vacation and when it came time to retire, he and his wife Dale moved here full time, soon becoming regulars at the Fox Theatre and Centennial Hall and season ticket holders for men’s and women’s basketball and softball.
But the Adamsbaums were interested in engaging with the community and the university on a more meaningful level and decided to establish a scholarship. While they were researching what could have the most impact, Adamsbaum also thought back to his formative days in New York, and his first-hand knowledge of the historical challenges facing the city’s Black communities.
“Because of the experiences I had growing in a community with mixed cultures, I always understood that not everybody has the same opportunities,” he said.
In 2024, Paul and Dale founded the Adamsbaum Family Endowed Award in Africana Studies, the first ever scholarship endowment in the Department of Africana Studies. In May, the couple got to meet the first scholarship recipient at the College of Humanities annual Honors Luncheon.
Samia Hartley, now a sophomore, is a double major in Africana Studies and medicine, with a career goal of becoming an emergency and trauma surgeon. She started at the University of Arizona knowing she wanted to major in medicine, but also started going to African American Student Affairs events and enrolled in an introductory Africana Studies course, which soon prompted her to add the major.
“Hearing more about the major and getting more involved in that made it very interesting to me. It was hard for me growing up and not knowing much about my ancestry because of the slave trade. I wanted to learn more about my history. It’s a self-journey,” she said.
Hartley sees her Africana Studies major as something that will make a positive impact on her career as a physician.
“The combination of medicine and Africana Studies is great for me because there are a lot of disparities for black women in the medical world,” she said. “By understanding how those disparities developed, I can be able to confront them.”
Hartley’s combination of science and humanities fits right in line with the Adamsbaums' goals in establishing the scholarship.
“We want to empower scholars to use their education,” Adamsbaum said. “Hopefully they can take something away from their studies they can use to go out into the world and influence people.”