Bard Center for the Study of Hate Names Jamal Armstead as Winner of the 2026 Beth Rickey Award

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—The Bard Center for the Study of Hate (BCSH) is proud to announce Jamal Armstead ’26 as the recipient of this year’s Beth Rickey Award. The award is presented annually to a member of Bard College’s international network of schools who has taken sustained and effective action against hate.
 
The annual Beth Rickey Award is given in memory of Elizabeth “Beth” Rickey, who died on September 12, 2009. Rickey was a Republican state committeewoman in Louisiana. Politically conservative, Rickey was appalled when neo-Nazi and former Klansman David Duke won elected office, and devastated that many of her fellow Republicans in state government welcomed Duke into their midst. She made it her mission to expose Duke, following him to meetings with other white supremacists, showing that he continued to sell Mein Kampf and Holocaust-denying material from his legislative office. 
 
The recipient’s achievements can be through their scholarship, adding to our understanding of how hatred works, or through their actions, such as public advocacy and community organizing.
 
Rickey’s dedication to justice is shared by Armstead, although the two activists followed quite different trajectories. Armstead was arrested at 17 and has spent most of the last two decades behind bars. In 2021, he enrolled in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), which offers undergraduate and graduate degrees to students incarcerated in New York state prisons. He graduated this year with his bachelor’s degree after completing his senior project entitled “The Public Health Implications of Anti-LGBTQ+ Discrimination: How Conformity and Lack of Awareness Lead to Crisis.”
 
Armstead completed a public health fellowship after his release from prison. He is now pursuing a Bard MBA in Sustainability, working toward his goal of creating an organization that will, in the words of Megan Callaghan, dean of BPI, “help design a safe haven for LGBTQ+ youth impacted by the criminal legal system.”
 
As Dean Callaghan recounted in her nominating letter:
 
“While incarcerated at a men’s maximum security prison, Jamal became aware of the way that he and others around him had actively ostracized anyone who was openly gay or gender nonconforming. Incarcerated as a teenager, he had grown up with these social norms and knew that anyone seen socializing with someone who had been identified as gay could be a target of violence . . . [A] combination of personal experience and the readings he encountered [in Bard classes] provoked him to begin reflecting on the injustice of this situation for the first time . . . For four years, in two different prisons, Jamal used his time at Bard to build an inclusive community and to develop academic expertise that would position him to support LGBTQ+ youth in the future.”
 
Kenneth S. Stern ’75, director of the BCSH and a friend of Rickey’s, said: “Of all the nominees this year, Mr. Armstead stood out. I used to be a criminal defense attorney who sometimes had a gay client, and I always worried about the extra danger they’d face if they were sent to prison. Mr. Armstead saw this hatred first hand and acted. Doing so while behind bars took courage. We hope this acknowledgment, in the spirit of Beth Rickey, may help him achieve his goals, empowered in part by the academic skills he learned through his Bard degree.”
 
About the Bard Center for the Study of Hate
BCSH works to increase the serious study of human hatred, and ways to combat it. The Beth Rickey Award is supported, in part, by people who worked with Beth Rickey—including academics and journalists—as well as The Southern Institute for Education and Research Archive. For more about the Beth Rickey Award, visit bcsh.bard.edu/beth-rickey-award. BCSH is a program of Bard’s Human Rights Project. For more information, visit bcsh.bard.edu.
 
About the Bard Prison Initiative
The Bard Prison Initiative was founded by Bard undergraduates, launching as a pilot program with 16 students in 2001. Today, BPI operates in seven interconnected prisons in New York State. It enrolls over 400 students and organizes a host of extracurricular activities to replicate the breadth of college life and inquiry. In all its work over its 25 years, BPI builds alliances to rethink access, reduce costs, and redress inequities in higher education. For more information, visit bpi.bard.edu.
 
About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place and Massena properties, Bard’s campus consists of more than 1,200 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; advanced degrees through 14 graduate programs; 10 early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 166-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at the main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
 
 

This event was last updated on 09-12-2026

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