This article describes how Dr. Ben Vinson III, the new director of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a specialist in Latin American history, is strengthening the center's internationalist orientation. While it took more than three decades for Johns Hopkins University to approve a Black studies program in its arts and sciences division, faculty members and administrators at the elite Baltimore-based research institution created an academic center by wisely drawing upon its base of scholars in African and African Diaspora studies. Established in 2004, the university's Center for Africana Studies has brought to the forefront a strong and timely academic focus on the African Diaspora. Although the Diaspora focus is not new to Africana studies, it emphasizes that international considerations are strongly shaping Black studies at U.S. institutions. The presence of young scholars with African Diaspora expertise and research background, such as Vinson, signals that Black studies is undergoing a generational shift where scholars trained in African Diaspora studies find themselves highly prized and recruited as much as their colleagues in the African-American fields. For their part, veteran university scholars affiliated with the Center for Africana Studies have greeted the center's establishment with obvious pride after having worked hard for its establishment. They praise current university administrators, students and supportive faculty members who helped reverse the faculty resistance that previous administrations had encountered when the school had considered launching Black studies as an academic program between the 1970s and 1990s.