Some might think Fannie Barrier Williams’s 1905 commentary on “the colored girl” a peculiar place to begin this examination of late-twentiethcentury African American women in the historical profession. But Williams’s words, as well as her experiences, resonate in the autobiographies compiled in this volume and in the history of black women in the historical profession. Williams was, after all, an educator and a tenacious trailblazer for professional African American women. She was, like the Chicago “girls” she refers to, audacious. One need look no further than her refusal in 1894 to withdraw her nomination for membership in the all-white, very...

I write as an almost-former historian, someone who retired from teaching history and who will be, by the time this volume is published, a fulltime undergraduate student in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Even though some historians’ contributions and honors remain—two more books to be published and presidencies of the Southern Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians—I think of myself these summer days as pretty much past the conventions of academic history. I write to you personally, looking back on a gratifying part of my life. History has given me much...

Imagine my surprise and delight when I learned that I was to be inducted as a fellow into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on October 6, 2006. The letter indicated that my work in the history of black women was the primary basis for this honor. I never entertained any thoughts of receiving such a distinction. To be named a fellow in the AAAS represented, along with my earlier presidential tenures of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association, the academy’s recognition and acceptance of black women’s history as an integral and legitimate area of...

My path to becoming a historian was not inevitable or preordained. Perhaps nothing more ectively put me on a path toward this endeavor than the insidious combination of poverty and racism. Growing up in the segregated South profoundly shaped my worldview and my work as a historian in two basic ways. It gave me a reverential view of education, and it instilled in me a determination to struggle incessantly against racism, sexism, and social and cultural ostracism. Different people have used various strategies to cope with or fight against such evils. Some accommodated, others became openly defiant, and still others...

Reading poet and scholar Gloria Wade-Gayles’s personal essay, “When Race Is Memory and Blackness Is Choice,” made me understand why we get along so well and why we both have functioned outside of the box. We are from a generation of black women intellectuals who have been trained, for the most part, outside of black institutions. However, unlike many of our sisters who remained in mainstream institutions, we chose to teach in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In so doing, we opted to practice outside of the box. As a result, Gloria and I share the frustrations and rewards...

Before the Southern Historical Association meeting of 2003, I never gave much thought to how and why I became a historian. But the meeting was a sort of turning point for me because a session on the impact of my first book,Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, was on the program.¹ I was deeply honored, in fact humbled, by the recognition, but in writing my response to the papers on that panel, I was forced to reflect on how I came to write and feel about the book. Two years later, I was again forced...

Nearly twenty-five years after receiving a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Howard University, I find that writing a personal reflection of my life as an academic offers an extraordinary opportunity to be my own subject—to sharemy own historyof being an African American woman historian and university professor specializing in African American women’s history. Since writing a personal memoir or autobiographical text is a chance for a scholar to reflexively confront the continual task of the historian—to consciously (and subconsciously) choose the elements to include and exclude—it reveals significant aspects of my mission in life to...

“O but Julie, tell me, did I stay free [inaudible] the community [inaudible]?” In the eight months since her stroke, my mother’s voice sometimes seems to me to behave like a written document. I hear just enough to know that what she has said is critical, and then her words become indistinct. Her spoken meanings emerge in fragments, never entirely escaping the blank, obscuring invisibility that always threatens written texts. I heard enough from her one September morning in 2006 to understand that she had given me a provocative theme for this quasi-autobiographical reflection on how I came to the...

My place in the academy has been defined as much by personal transformations as by race and gender. Orphaned as a teenager and unsure of my place in the world, I struggled to find the resources to attend college. The need to fulfill a personal and professional dream drove me to teaching. A combination of frustration with teaching in public schools and the support of a college professor led me to the academy.

My background does not fit easily or neatly into the traditional characterization of faculty in the ivory tower. I began the academic journey as an outsider and...

I actually never liked history very much as a child. Or at least I didn’t think I liked it. I grew up in segregated Virginia. My hometown was the typical small southern town with a huge Confederate memorial in the middle of downtown. Blacks and whites there were as separate as “the five fingers” of the hand. I attended public schools—at that time, some of the worst in the nation. I remember that in the fifth grade, we did not have a library, laboratory, musical instruments, or art supplies. We did, however, have marvelous black teachers who really cared...

Have you ever cried dry tears? I learned to weep without visible evidence in my departmental office after the passing of my two senior colleagues, pioneering literary critic Barbara Christian (1943–2000) and renowned poet and activist June Jordan (1936–2002). The loss of these two colleagues and the mounting pressures of a workplace where I felt their absence daily sent me into a tailspin of sadness and worry. The loss of my father and sister followed within the next two years. In the wake of their deaths, however, I discovered two unexpected sources of healing: wet tears and intellectual...

One of the reasons why it is hard for me to explain how I came to be a historian of African American history is that I did not grow up in the United States. My family moved to Canada when I was five years old, and I lived there, and at times in Northern Europe, until I was twenty-five and returned to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in history at Yale University. My years in junior high school, high school, and college (known in Canada as university) took place in the polyglot multiethnic world of Toronto, where neither...

The Rock of Gibraltar myth be damned. The life of a black woman academic can be just as eventful and fragile as the lives of others. Over the past four years, I have learned some very tough lessons about my body, my character, and my professional community. When I pull back from the agonizing intricate details of every lived moment, I get some helpful perspective. From a distance, I can see that my experiences have been about choices, some that I have been fully aware of and others that I came to realize only through the process of living and...

It is a vivid memory—one simultaneously amusing and painful. June 1988: The first Southern Conference on Women’s History, sponsored by the Southern Association of Women Historians (SAWH), is meeting at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I had been on the program committee and worked alongside a group of black and white women historians committed to making sure this conference is an inclusive gathering—fully incorporating graduate students, emphasizing a wide range of women’s histories, ensuring that not only SAWH members but also a wide range of historians of women are recognized and participate as presenters and commentators. Yet...

It was 1984 and I was seventeen when I took Professor Adrienne Lash Jones’s class “Black Women in America” at Oberlin College. Though I had taken courses in the Department of Black Studies before, I had avoided the Department of History, thanks to a youthful arrogance that I could craft a truer, more authentic narrative of the past through the literary and critical theoretical essays I’d encountered in other classes. Those essays, written mostly by women of color, shook me to the core. The work of black feminist writers and essayists pointed the way for me to become an academic....

What does it mean to be a black female historian in 2006? Some argue that it should simply mean being a good scholar and that’s it. They contend that notions of race and gender are twentieth-century anachronisms that obscure more than they illuminate. I only wish it were true. My experience, and that of hundreds of other female historians of African descent working and struggling in the academy, tells a very different story. It is a story that reflects slow, erratic progress but also persistent, intractable prejudice augmented by the precedent of generations of institutional racism. It is a story...

It is the fall of 2007 as I write this essay. I just finished writing a book. But my father couldn’t read or write. The distance between us spans the hundred years of black history that I study.

Writing that statement makes me catch my breath, pained by the sharpness of the contrasts between our lives. My parents, the elderly couple who raised me, were born in the era ofPlessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that sanctioned Jim Crow. They farmed in the rural South, moved to New York with the Great Migration, and worked in the...

In the spring of 1997, after attending my first graduate-student conference at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where, as the only African American participant, I was virtually ignored and my work on the lynching of black and white women viciously attacked, Nell Painter welcomed me “to the long-suffering, much-abused community of black women academics.” Painter was responding to my article in the Coordinating Council of Women’s Historians newsletter, “An Open Letter to My Advisor.” In it, I recounted in detail how I was treated at the conference. A third-year graduate student at Princeton University, I should not have been...