History Of Black Women Research Articles

Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women's Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America

Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women's Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America

"Denial of Equality of Opportunity Is Immoral": The Black Queer Radical Feminism of Ernestine Eckstein

Abstract: This article examines the African American queer radical feminist activist, Ernestine Eckstein, a daughter of the South born in the urban cultural center of Memphis, Tennessee and raised in the Midwest in South Bend, Indiana. This work explores the numerous barriers Eckstein faced due to her multiple intersecting identities. Drawing on oral history, archival records, magazine articles, and newspaper articles, as well as secondary literature, this work contributes to and enhances our understanding of Black and queer histories. I investigate the radical tools of resistance Eckstein employed to challenge systems of oppression constructed by white supremacy including racism, sexism, and misogynoir. Spanning a short historical era, from the mid-to-late 20th century, I explore Eckstein's political awakening and crucial role in the fight against sexual and racial discrimination. Centering Eckstein's life and activism expands ideas and understandings of Black womanhood and highlights discrimination within African American and gay and lesbian communities. In this article I center Eckstein as a fighter for equality in her own narrative rather than at the margins of queer white history and heteronormative Black women's history.

Abjection of Coloured Women and their Tragic Journey of Trifold Oppression in Toni Morrison's Beloved and The Bluest Eye

The world is gifted with various distinguished creatures irrespective of colour, creed, energy, work and so on. "Black" as a race is socially constructed by human being and this stereotype crosses the line when the so called white people imposed tortures quoting the skin colour and treating them as untouchables. The word "black" representing people itself is a falsified racist classification based on their skin colour for their dark complexion. Based on the trifold oppression they face, her writings states how people are denied from equality and subjugated as slaves in their own place. Morrison has won many prizes and awards and she is also a renowned speaker at major literary gatherings. She has a great concern on coloured people in general and so she reflects the trifold oppression and effortlessly she bring out the richness of black culture and it's ethnicity by reconstructing black images through her writing. Toni Morrison writes the novel having coloured people as the central characters especially women. Only with Morrison, there was a turning point in the history of Black women's literature. This paper attempts to investigate the brutal state of coloured women who have experienced trauma in various forms. This study also broods over the trifold oppression in the form of race, gender and class which leads them to slavery throughout their lifetime.

The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico

The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico

Chaucer's Wenches

Abstract: This essay analyzes the eighteen occurrences of the word wenche in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and argues that the idea of the "wenche" persists today, most notably as implicit justification for the rescinding of the constitutional right to an abortion in the US Supreme Court's monumental decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (June 2022). It takes a Black feminist approach by situating Chaucer's wenches in the context of Black women's history and tracing how the word's resonances continued their pernicious work of making meaning and shaping material realities long after the Middle Ages. It first gives a careful history of wench 's origins and accretion of meaning from the early to the late Middle Ages, paying particular attention to its relationship with the Latin ancilla . It uses the Wycliffite Bible as a lens to explore the term's rapidly accruing connotations of youth, servitude, femininity, and transgressive sexuality, and discusses the connections between "wenche" and reproduction in An Alphabet of Tales and Geoffrey the Grammarian's Promptorium parvulorum before tracing its symbolic freight across the Canterbury Tales and pointing to its underlying role in struggles for reproductive justice in our own time.

Prisoners’ Rights, Resistance, and the Law in Postwar Texas Prisons

Prisoners’ Rights, Resistance, and the Law in Postwar Texas Prisons

Jazz Feminism is to Soul as Purple is to Lavender

Jazz Feminism is to <i>Soul</i> as Purple is to Lavender

Some Historiographical Aspects about African and Afro-Brazilian Black Men and Women in the Diaspora and in the Formation of Brazil

The teaching of Afro-Brazilian history and culture has become mandatory in 2003 with Law 10,639. Until this date, the history that has been told to us, mainly through textbooks, has impregnated in the collective imaginary the representation of black bodies as bodies devoid of humanity, reified bodies, without any reaction to the system of slavery to which they were subjected. Despite the process of exclusion that they still experience in contemporary times, the history of black women and men in the African and Afro-Brazilian diaspora requires another narrative that will restore to this humanity its place of protagonism and resistance in the formation of Brazil. That is the purpose of this text.

Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman by Sheena Harris

Reviewed by: Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman by Sheena Harris Leigh Soares Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman. By Sheena Harris. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 210. $55.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-619-3.) Building on literature that has shed new light on the lives and leadership of Black women traditionally overshadowed by the renowned "race men" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Sheena Harris has written the first scholarly biography of Margaret Murray Washington. Born enslaved in Macon, Mississippi, Washington is known most for her marriage to Booker T. Washington as he arrived at the height of his power, but here readers see how she became a prominent educator and race leader in her own right. She developed a robust curriculum for Black girls at Tuskegee Institute, promoted Black history education in Black schools across the South, and organized Black women to lead racial uplift movements in their own communities. With this biography of Margaret Washington, Harris "not only restores her to the history of HBCU administrators and club women, but also illuminates the interconnections among movements that stood against racial and gender oppression" (p. 10). [End Page 403] Drawing on a wide range of personal correspondence, public writings, and institutional records, Harris traces the life and career of Washington from her birth in 1861 to her death in 1925. The first three chapters recount Washington's childhood, her education at Fisk University, her marriage to Booker, and her pedagogical commitments as Lady Principal of Tuskegee Institute. Harris emphasizes how Washington's early experiences in the rural, impoverished South helped shape the vision of Black education she brought with her to Tuskegee—one that emphasized respectability, the professionalization of domestic labor, and the uplift of the home. Washington's commitment to industrial education, Harris explains, "was not an accommodationist view, as many critics of her husband asserted, but rather a survivalist strategy" (p. 55). The last three chapters follow Washington's club work on three scales: local (the Tuskegee Women's Club), national (including the National Association of Colored Women and the Southern Federation of Women's Clubs), and international (the International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World). Washington certainly benefited from her husband's fame and influence, but she carved out a respected leadership role for herself through increasingly ambitious organizing, all in service of advancing the study of Black life, uplifting Black women and children, and fighting the spread of white supremacy. Although Harris clearly admires Washington, she does not pull punches when examining the leader's emergent elitism. "While [Washington] espoused views of cohesive [cross-class] collaborations, she herself remained exclusively separate," and most of the Black women Washington sought to uplift were excluded from membership in the numerous organizations she led (p. 144). One of the benefits of biography is the way individual experiences can provide insight into the people behind movements. In several effective passages, Harris explores the physical and emotional toll on Washington as she struggled to find a balance among her work commitments, her responsibilities as a wife and mother, and her personal well-being, highlighting the unique challenges Black women faced as they pursued public leadership. Although the narrative is at times ambivalent about the relationship between her work and the so-called Tuskegee Machine, it is clearer about Washington's connection to a wide network of Black race women rooted in the South. Harris shows Washington collaborating with other understudied reformers in the region, including Josephine Bruce, Lugenia Burns Hope, and Cornelia Bowen. Readers interested in Black women's history and educational history will appreciate this recovery of the life and career of Margaret Murray Washington. Leigh Soares Mississippi State University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Contributing Authors

CÉCILE ACCILIEN is the chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies and a professor of African and African Diaspora studies at Kennesaw State University, Georgia.LISETTE ACOSTA CORNIEL is an assistant professor of Latin American studies in the Department of Race and Ethnic Studies at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY.GISELLE LIZA ANATOL is a professor of English at the University of Kansas, Lawrence and the outgoing president of the international Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars.ELIZABETH ARANDA is a professor of sociology and associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Florida. A native of Puerto Rico, she has dedicated herself to documenting the lived experience of migration and to share (im)migrants’ stories through her research and teaching. Her research addresses migrants’ emotional well-being and their adapting to challenges posed by racial and ethnic inequalities and legal status. Email: earanda@usf.eduREBECA BLACKWELL is a sociology PhD candidate at the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on the areas of social psychology and social communication. She studies emotions in society, cultural understandings of health, disability, and migration. Some of her previous work includes social issues in Venezuela, her native country, and Peru, her adoptive home for five years. She comes from a background in translation work and linguistic research back in Venezuela. Email: rblackwell@usf.eduSARAH A. CLUNIS is originally from Kingston, Jamaica, and received her PhD in art history in 2006 and a master's in art history in 2000 from the University of Iowa. She is the curator of the African Collections and director of academic partnerships at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, having previously worked as the director of the Xavier University Art Gallery, supervisor of the art collection team, and assistant professor of art history at Xavier University in Louisiana. She specializes in the arts of Africa and the African Diaspora from traditional to contemporary. Clunis has also published in national and international magazines and journals. Her work examines gender, race, and migration in multiple contexts. She is currently the project curator for the Helis Foundation John Scott Center at the Louisiana Endowment of the Humanities, developing a permanent exhibition titled Dancing at the Crossroads, an organic development of her professional and scholarly trajectory. Clunis continues to work on multiple projects on the visual culture of Afrofuturism and diversity and inclusion in the arts.SABINE LAMOUR is an international sociologist trained in France and Haiti. Currently, she is completing a research project that explores the role of the evangelical in the political context. Since 2005, she has been working with Haitian women's organizations as a feminist activist and an independent consultant at both urban and rural levels. Since 2017, she has been the national coordinator of Solidarite Fanm Ayisyèn (SOFA)and has taught courses at l'Université d’État d'Haïti (UEH) since 2012. She is interested in topics such as gender, sexualities, slavery, family dynamics in the Caribbean, and Haiti's political system. In 2018, Lamour copublished Déjouer le Silence: Contre-discours sur les Femmes Haïtiennes and has published articles in Chemins critiques; Women, Gender, and Families of Color; and Revue internationale des études du développement.LAURA LOPEZ MARTINEZ received a bachelor of arts degree from the Universidad de los Andes, in Bogota, Colombia. She also holds a master's in history and literature from the Columbia University. Currently, she is finishing her second year as a PhD student in modern languages at Swansea University, Wales. Her thesis is a comparative study of the works of two Caribbean writers: Edwidge Danticat and Hazel Robinson, through the lens of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies. Lopez Martinez's research explores issues such as language and identity, gender, and the relationship between human beings and nature.ALEXANDRIA MILLER is a PhD student in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her research interests include Africana feminisms, Caribbean studies, Black women's intellectual history, and cultural studies.ALESSANDRA ROSA is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Sociology at University of South Florida. As a Puerto Rican, she has dedicated her teaching, research, and service to fostering diversity, equity, and justice. Her research centers on social movements, internet activism, education, Puerto Rican studies, postdisaster migration studies, emotional well-being, and discourse analysis. Email: amrosa1@usf.edu.

Social movements, community education, and the fight for racial justice: Black women and social transformation

AbstractThis article addresses the role of community learning within social movements and the fight for social justice and human rights. To understand contemporary social movements and their role in community learning and advocacy for social change, it is essential to contextualize them within the long history of Black women's activist labor and accomplishments. The #BLM movement is presented as a continuation of Black women's longstanding inclusive activism, punctuated by the Abolition, Suffrage, Civil Rights, and modern feminist movements. It highlights the efforts of specific Black women community leaders in creating counterpublics that make claims to power and work to change the status quo. Black women, through their inclusive, community‐based activist endeavors, continue to carve out fugitive spaces and counterpublics where counternarratives are actively generated to fight for a more equitable and inclusive democracy that serves all. This article conceptualizes the role of adult education in social movements and transformative change.

Claudia Jones, International Thinker

AbstractThis article analyses the early international thought of Trinidad-born Marxist journalist Claudia Jones. We focus on a neglected aspect of Jones's intellectual production in the United States: her interrogation of geopolitics in her Weekly Review articles in the early 1940s. We situate Jones in relation to the contemporary popularization of geopolitical thought in this period, reading her alongside another neglected figure in histories of international thought, the African American geopolitical scholar and diplomatic historian Merze Tate. Jones read together the geopolitical, class, racialized, and anticolonial implications of the expanding Nazi empire, positioning her at the forefront of Marxist theoretical innovation in this period. Moving beyond studies of canonical texts and white male thinkers in international intellectual history, we build on black women's intellectual history to center a black working-class woman's popular theorizing of international relations.

In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America by Kabria Baumgartner

Reviewed by: In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America by Kabria Baumgartner Lucia McMahon (bio) Education history, Black women's history, Female academies, School segregation In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America. By Kabria Baumgartner. (New York: New York University Press, 2019. Pp. 286. Cloth, $35.00.) In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America presents compelling case studies of activism that took place in classrooms, communities, and courtrooms. Drawing on a variety of source materials, including school catalogues, court records, petitions, and correspondence, Kabria Baumgartner effectively brings to life both institutional accounts and individual experiences that reveal key moments in "the larger struggle for African American education in the early nineteenth century" (8). Efforts by African American girls and young women to gain access to educational spaces were individual "acts of defiance and protest" (2) that reflected collective struggles. The story of the Canterbury Female Seminary in Connecticut represents one chapter in a larger narrative illustrating the fierce, sometimes violent, opposition that Black students faced, as well as their determination to pursue knowledge. When Prudence Crandall, a white Quaker woman, agreed to admit Sarah Harris to her Canterbury Female Seminary in 1832, white students and residents protested. Crandall transformed her school into one exclusively for African American students, but rather than resolve the controversy, her decision sparked further community backlash. The town passed a law "effectively criminalizing the Canterbury Female Seminary" (32). Crandall and her students faced legal action, trials, threats, and harassment that ultimately led to the Canterbury Female Seminary's closure in 1834, after a group of local residents vandalized the school building. Four years after the Canterbury Female Seminary was forced to close, Mary E. Miles, one of its students, applied to attend the Young Ladies' Domestic Seminary in Clinton, New York. Her enrollment, as Baumgartner notes, transformed that institution into "the first racially integrated female seminary in New York, if not the entire North" (47). Founded by abolitionist Hiram Huntington Kellog, the Young Ladies' Domestic Seminary initially welcomed white women from poor, working-class, and [End Page 316] middle-class backgrounds; tuition costs could be reduced based upon the domestic labor a student performed. Supported by Kellog's pedagogical and reformist principles, students cultivated a shared commitment to Christian values and antislavery reform. African American women's pursuits of knowledge were shaped by institutional developments, as a variety of academies, seminaries, high schools, and common schools were in operation by the 1830s. In this evolving educational landscape, private academies and seminaries were unpredictable entities subject to closures due to fiscal constraints, personal circumstances, or community tensions. The era's growing public school movement promised more democratic and permanent access to educational opportunities, but these institutions were often sites of inequity and exclusion. By the 1830s, as Part II of In Pursuit of Knowledge emphasizes, African American activists increasingly pursued equal school rights at public schools as a key means of advocating for civil rights. Efforts to challenge racial segregation practices in public schools, as Baumgartner notes, were often "hyperlocal" (111), varying according to local practices and precedents. In Salem, Massachusetts, Baumgartner has found evidence that at least some of the town's primary-level schools "were not racially exclusive" (112). The seemingly arbitrary aspects of the Salem school system were directly challenged in 1834, when Sarah Parker Remond and her sisters passed the entrance exam to the East School for Girls, a high school offering advanced studies to young women. The Remond sisters "excelled at their studies" (119), but community outrage led to their expulsion, and to the creation of a separate school for African American students. There were numerous public schools in Salem for white students, but African American students were now confined to one school building. This was, Baumgartner asserts, a deliberate, systematic response to the challenges posed by the educational aspirations and achievements of African American girls. "A policy of racial school segregation became systematic in 1834 because of white resentment toward the Remond sisters" (122). In towns and cities across the North, educational activists continued to fight for equal school rights through petitions, court cases, boycotts, and...

"The rights and privileges all people should enjoy": Reflections on Archival Collaboration and Black Women's Epistolary Resistance

"The rights and privileges all people should enjoy":Reflections on Archival Collaboration and Black Women's Epistolary Resistance Emily Ruth Rutter (bio) and Derrick C. Jones (bio) Keywords Black women's epistolary, Black women's resistance, Wilmington Insurrection, President William McKinley, African American studies, collaboration, non-academic researchers, academic publishing, academic privilege, women's writing, women's and gender studies A few days after a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on 12 August 2017, reminded the nation of the continued virulence of anti-Black racism, I attended a letter-writing event organized by my local Black Lives Matter chapter. Of conversation were the potential risks involved in signing one's name to a political statement that could be made public, especially with renewed fears about governmental surveillance and emboldened commitments to white supremacy. This discussion was reminiscent of one in which I had been engaged with a recent acquaintance and fellow North Carolina native Derrick C. Jones, who had been culling through letters within Department of Justice file 1898–17743. These letters—several of which were composed by African American women and a few of which were unsigned for fear of retribution—implore then United States President William McKinley to intervene on the Black community's behalf as white supremacist forces threatened their businesses, their homes, and ultimately their lives in what is commonly known as the 1898 Wilmington Insurrection (and, more accurately, as the Wilmington coup d'etat). Regrettably, such epistolary entreatments to President McKinley were ignored, and what H. Leon Prather, Sr. describes as "the most ghastly racial massacre of the Progressive Era" occurred without a federal response.1 As Timothy B. Tyson and David S. Cecelski recount, Victory at the polls did not satisfy the Democrats. … White vigilantes first burned the printing press of Alexander Manly, publisher of what was said to be the only black-owned daily newspaper in the United States. Next they marched into the neighborhood called Brooklyn, where they left a trail of dead and dying African Americans. Armed with repeating rifles and rapid-fire guns, they outgunned the black men who sought to defend their homes with antique revolvers and shotguns. That night and the next day, hundreds of black women and children huddled in the swamps outside Wilmington. The white insurgents forced the city's officials who had not been up for election two days earlier to resign and took power for themselves. … many Wilmington blacks believe that the death toll exceeded 300. Yet not even the highest estimate of the dead aroused white outrage.2 [End Page 151] Historians such as Tyson, Cecelski, Prather, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, David Zucchino, among others, as well as two turn-of-the-twentiethcentury novels, Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and David Bryant Fulton's Hanover; or The Persecution of the Lowly: A Story of the Wilmington Massacre (1900), have kept the 1898 events in Wilmington alive in America's conscience.3 These writers and historians demonstrate both the bloody toll that postbellum Democrats—"the self-avowed 'party of white supremacy'"—were willing to exact in order to dismantle an integrationist Republican agenda and the complicity of the federal government in these extralegal waves of white terror.4 The cache of letters that Jones sifted through and subsequently shared with me are also an integral part of this history. As this essay suggests, these letters are especially crucial in documenting late-nineteenth-century Black women's united resistance to postbellum efforts to deny African Americans their hard won and newly granted citizenship rights. Taking our cues from this network of Black women scribblers, Jones and I have been engaged in an epistolary dialogue, exchanging correspondence about the letters in file 1898–17743 and working in tandem to draft our findings. In an effort to ensure that these letters receive the attention they deserve in terms of women's history—and Black women's history in particular—we have found that transgressing the often invisible boundary drawn between academic and non-academic researchers has been key. Like nearly all non-academics, Jones, a retired public school administrator, does not have access to online databases paid for by an institution or knowledge...

Riot and Reclamation: Black Women, Prison Labor, and Resistive Desires

This article analyzes an interracial women's strike at Wetumpka State Penitentiary in Alabama in 1934. By centering the prison, it challenges southern Black women's long understood absence from factories and their labor movements. As a site of coerced and unpaid labor, the prison represented one of the many places where Black women worked that was unprotected by nascent pro-labor national legislation. And by analyzing Black women's history of industrial labor resistance at Wetumpka, this article calls attention to how incarcerated Black women's labor struggles diverged from but remained an important part of the state's galvanized labor movement. Rather than searching for a similitude of "free world" labor movements, it argues that incarcerated Black women's oppositional politics looked different, because they stemmed from fundamentally different positionalities. Indeed, their refusal to ally with the state, along withthe relationships that theyformed inside, catalyzedaqueer labor politic.

Scholars of color turn to womanism: Countering dehumanization in the academy

The article draws on critiques in political theory and morality to argue that womanism, a worldview rooted in Black women's lives and history, provides an alternative conceptual framework to prevailing Eurocentric thinking, for promoting socially just institutions of higher education. Presupposing a positioned, encultured, and embodied account of identity, womanism’s social change perspective holds transformative promise. It foregrounds Black women’s penchant for reaching solutions that promote communal balance, affirm one’s humanity and attend to the spiritual dimension (Phillips, 2006). Directed first towards scholars of color, fostering inclusivity, communalist values and acknowledged intersectionality offers an ethic of the embodied self. As a corollary, it argues for a universal that recommends at least two guiding principles for a pedagogical philosophy. It is, first oriented towards a love of self and second towards placing all disciplines within a cultural-historical context. In the first claim, there is potential for nothing less than suspending the symbolic and ontological violence to one’s sense of belonging in academia. In the second claim, such an understanding can position scholars of color to actively re-narrate their fields. As illustrations, we focus on three academic fields of education, theology in higher education, and criminal justice.

Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal by Shennette Garrett-Scott

Reviewed by: Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal by Shennette Garrett-Scott Francille Rusan Wilson Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal. By Shennette Garrett-Scott. Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 273. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-231-18391-8; cloth, $105.00, ISBN 978-0-231-18390-1.) Shennette Garrett-Scott’s history of black women’s participation in the world of banking and finance from emancipation to the New Deal is richly detailed and nuanced. Employing a sophisticated intersectional analysis, Garrett-Scott argues that black women, their families, and their communities faced three mutually reinforcing barriers to fulfilling their dreams of economic security and meaningful citizenship: the U.S. financial system; gendered and class-based norms of domesticity and respectability; and the racist regimes of Jim Crow. Garrett-Scott makes a significant contribution to African American, economic, and women’s history in her deft explications of the ways race, gender, and class combined to make “complicated entanglements” with American capitalism (p. 4). She carefully explores the complex and sometimes conflicting ideals of the women bankers, clerks, depositors, and investors at the heart of her study who built and sustained the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia, for more than three decades. In so doing, Garrett-Scott offers important insights into the myriad ways that American financial institutions both encouraged and subverted the desires of black citizens to fully participate in wealth building from emancipation to the 1930s. Garrett-Scott’s insistence that freedwomen and their daughters used both formal and informal banking and insurance structures, such as mutual benefit and benevolent societies, also broadens the traditional scope of histories of banking in the United States to include black women as hopeful developers of new insurance products, as bank founders, and as discerning and often cautious consumers. Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal supplies the wider context of southern black women’s often fraught relationships with banking and insurance products by beginning in the 1850s and using the Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL, founded in 1869) as its central case study. Garrett-Scott expertly mines rich sources in the records of southern mutual benefit societies, fraternal organizations, black banks, and personal papers to recover women’s activities and ideals. In the early 1880s a young energetic and entrepreneurial normal school graduate, Maggie Lena Draper Mitchell Walker (1864–1934), became an officer of her IOSL lodge and a clerk for the central governing body. Over the next two decades, Walker rose to be the IOSL’s most respected official and made black women’s economic empowerment central to the organization’s purpose as its leader from the turn of the twentieth century to the dawn of the New Deal. Under Walker, the IOSL continued as a fraternal order and insurance company, under regulation in every state that had a lodge, and it pushed further [End Page 212] into the world of finance by establishing the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in 1903. It was one of hundreds of black banks but the first to be chartered by a woman. At the same time, southern insurance and bank regulators increased their scrutiny of small undercapitalized financial institutions. Garrett-Scott keeps her focus on Walker’s balancing efforts to keep the IOSL’s communitarian principles for evaluating lenders’ worthiness while adopting a more stringent analysis of risk and reserves demanded by regulators. The St. Luke Bank and the IOSL became the largest private employer of black women in Richmond, but its prosperous niche in Richmond’s lively black economy also made it a target. An audacious attempt to compete directly with white Richmond merchants by opening an IOSL department store was short-lived. The Great Migration expanded the IOSL’s membership to more than 85,000 people nationwide with millions of dollars invested in deposits and insurance on the eve of the Depression, yet as Garrett-Scott observes, black financial success did not prove to be a panacea that alleviated the strictures of Jim Crow. In...

Historical News and Notices

Historical News and Notices Glenn T. Eskew THE ASSOCIATION The following appointees have been named to the SHA's Membership Committee for 2021: Kelly Kennington, Auburn University, chair; Erik B. Alexander, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville; Brian J. Daugherity, Virginia Commonwealth University; Shannon Eaves, College of Charleston; Robert Elder, Baylor University; Kristen Epps, Kansas State University; Andrew Fialka, Middle Tennessee State University; Lisa Tendrich Frank, independent scholar; Timothy Fritz, Mount St. Mary's University; Elijah Gaddis, Auburn University; Darren E. Grem, University of Mississippi; Luke E. Harlow, University of Tennessee; Mark D. Hersey, Mississippi State University; Kelly Houston Jones, Arkansas Tech University; Andrew W. Kahrl, University of Virginia; Allison Madar, University of Oregon; Adam Malka, University of Oklahoma; Noeleen McIlvenna, Wright State University; Giuliana Perrone, University of California, Santa Barbara; Holly A. Pinheiro Jr., Augusta University; K. Stephen Prince, University of South Florida; Ryan A. Quintana, Wellesley College; Selena Sanderfer Doss, Western Kentucky University; Whitney N. Stewart, University of Texas at Dallas; Felicity Turner, Georgia Southern University; and Emily West, University of Reading. ANNOUNCEMENTS AND ACTIVITIES The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) has announced that the 2020 Fishel-Calhoun Prize is awarded to Caroline Grego, for her article "Black Autonomy, Red Cross Recovery, and White Backlash after the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893," which appeared in the November 2019 issue of the Journal of Southern History. The Fishel-Calhoun Prize recognizes the best article written by an emerging scholar and published in the previous two years that deals with any aspect of United States history between 1865 and 1917. For information about SHGAPE, please visit https://www.shgape.org. The Georgia Historical Society (GHS) is now accepting applications for Vincent J. Dooley Distinguished Research Fellowships. These fellowships are intended to assist scholars in conducting on-site research specifically in the GHS Research Center collections, including manuscripts, photographs, architectural drawings, and rare and non-rare books, as well as maps, portraits, and artifacts. Research Fellowships will support scholars from outside the Savannah area engaged in graduate-level, postdoctoral, or independent research. Up to $5,000 will be awarded each cycle, with one to five Research Fellows in each award cycle. The research is expected to lead to a major piece of scholarly work such as a dissertation, a book, an article in a refereed scholarly journal, a chapter in an edited collection, or an academic paper presented at a scholarly conference. For eligibility and application requirements, please visit https://georgiahistory.com/about-ghs/vincent-j-dooley-distinguished-fellows-program/research-fellows. The deadline for applications is January 8, 2021. [End Page 948] OBITUARY Georgia State University (GSU) professor emerita Jacqueline Anne Rouse died at the age of seventy on May 12, 2020, from complications of pneumonia after a battle with cancer. One of the nation's leading scholars of black women's history, Dr. Rouse published to great acclaim on the topic and received accolades for her groundbreaking work on such leading figures as Margaret Murray Washington, Lugenia Burns Hope, and Septima P. Clark. In recognition of her scholarship and service, Dr. Rouse received the Founding Mothers/ Presidential Award of the Southern Association for Women Historians in 2016, and she was an honoree at Cross-Generational Dialogues in Black Women's History, sponsored by the Michigan State University Comparative Black History Program in 2015. Born February 1, 1950, a native of Virginia with a proud family history of independent black landowners in the rural Piedmont, Dr. Rouse earned her bachelor's degree in Afro-American history from Howard University in 1972, where she joined the Black Panthers. She spent several years teaching in the Department of Social Sciences at Palm Beach Junior College in Florida. Upon moving to Georgia, she completed a master's degree in African American history from Atlanta University, where, for much of the 1980s, she served as an assistant editor of the Journal of Negro History under editor Alton Hornsby Jr. She briefly returned to the Washington, D.C., area, where she held an internship at the Anacostia Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Rouse undertook doctoral training in the Institute for Liberal Arts at Emory University, where she completed her...

A Black Women's History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross

A Black Women's History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross

“The Future Is Intersectional”: Using the Arts to Reinsert Black Women Into the Civil Rights Narrative

In this article we outline the importance of reinserting the voices, experiences, and contributions of Black women as critical citizens into the narrative of the modern-day Civil Rights Movement. In order to examine the history of Black women as critical civic agents, teachers must interrogate how Black women’s raced and gendered identities intersect and result in a particular kind of discrimination that is oftentimes never examined. We explore the ways in which the arts can be integrated into the social studies and used to facilitate and elevate conversations regarding critical citizenship for middle grades students. We end by discussing the importance of teaching social studies through an intersectional lens utilizing the arts as a way to reframe critical civic activism and engagement.