Working for Democracy: Working-Class African-American Women, Citizenship, and Civil Rights in Detroit, 1940-1954

2003 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Taylor Shockley
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors

This chapter examines the fascinating history of Bennett College – one of only two single sex colleges dedicated to educating African American women. Although Bennett would not make that transition until 1926, the institution played a vital role in educating African American women in Greensboro, North Carolina from the betrayal of the Nadir to the promises of a New Negro Era. The latter period witnessed Bennett, under the leadership of David Dallas Jones, mold scores of young girls into politically conscious race women who were encouraged to resist Jim Crow policies and reject the false principals of white supremacy. Their politicization led to a massive boycott of a theatre in downtown Greensboro and helped to set the tone for Greensboro’s evolution into a critical launching point for the modern civil rights movement.


Collections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-381
Author(s):  
Julie L. Holcomb

Working-class and rural white women and free and enslaved African American women left few material traces, making it difficult for scholars to document their experience of the Civil War. This three-part article uses the story of the Timothy O. Webster Papers, which is part of the Pearce Civil War Collection at Navarro College in Corsi-cana, Texas, to examine the possibilities and limitations of recovering women's experience of the war from military collections. The first part examines the practice of collecting Civil War documents, the history of the Pearce Civil War Collection, and the collection and preservation of the Webster letters. In the second part, I begin to reconstruct Harriet's story using letters from the Webster Papers. The final part returns to the archive to consider how archivists might aid scholars in recovering the story of Civil War-era women from military collections.


Author(s):  
Jeannette Brown

Dr. Marie Maynard Daly received her PhD in Chemistry from Columbia University in 1947. Although she was hardly the first of her race and gender to engage in the field, she was the first African American woman to receive a PhD in chemistry in the United States. In this book, Jeannette Brown, an African American woman chemist herself, will present a wide-ranging historical introduction to the relatively new presence of African American women in the field of chemistry. It will detail their struggles to obtain an education and their efforts to succeed in a field in which there were few African American men, much less African American women. The book contains sketches of the lives of African America women chemists from the earliest pioneers up until the late 1960's when the Civil Rights Acts were passed and greater career opportunities began to emerge. In each sketch, Brown will explore women's motivation to study the field and detail their often quite significant accomplishments. Chapters focus on chemists in academia, industry, and government, as well as chemical engineers, whose career path is very different from that of the tradition chemist. The book concludes with a chapter on the future of African American women chemists, which will be of interest to all women interested in science.


1997 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 718-757 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Perkins

The Seven Sister colleges are well known for producing some of the nation's most successful women. At the turn of the century, they were recognized as the leading institutions for elite White women. In this article, Linda Perkins outlines the historical experiences of African American women attending the Seven Sister colleges from the institutions' founding to the civil rights era of the 1960s, a period during which approximately five hundred Black women graduated from these institutions. Through an exploration of university archives, alumni bulletins, and oral interviews with alumnae, Perkins shows that the Seven Sister colleges were not a monolithic entity: some admitted African American women as far back as the turn of the century, while others grudgingly, and only under great pressure, admitted them decades later. Perkins illustrates how the Seven Sister colleges mirrored the views of the larger society concerning race, and how issues of discrimination in admissions, housing, and financial aid in these institutions were influenced by, and had an influence on, the overall African American struggle for full participatory citizenship.


1998 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 254-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margie K. Kitano

This article describes factors affecting the life-span achievement of IS highly accomplished African American women from a national retrospective study of gifted women from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Participants were nominated as gifted by national professional organizations in their respective fields. Data were collected through face-to-face interviews of the women and telephone questionnaires administered to “parent” informants. Participants perceived that civil-rights and affirmative-action policies opened doors if they were already qualified. Interpreted within a cultural-ecological framework, findings suggested that cultural strengths plus their high ability enabled simultaneous acknowledgment of the effects of racism, sexism, and other hardships and application of positive coping strategies that are derived from these strengths.


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