Unita Blackwell first traveled to China in 1973 with Shirley MacLaine in a delegation of women to record the documentary The Other Half of the Sky. Based on a quote by Chairman Mao Zedong concerning gender equality in China, the film intended to understand and record the lives of women in Communist China. Born into a sharecropping family in rural Mississippi in 1933, by the time of this initial trip, …
Ann Barramont’s Petition to Sell: St. Vincent, 1791
Rarely have the colonial archives ever mentioned a Black Carib woman, let alone contained a document detailing her individual experience.
Oma’s Garden: Home Archives and a Black Woman’s Interior Life
Black women in archives are more than property, visitors, or employees. We are stakeholders. The stakes are even higher when the archive resides in our home
When the Archive Imitates Life: Research in Argentina
In particular the stares did not stop nor did the fascination that an American black woman actually wanted to mine their archives.
Yoga Journal Tried It: Social Media, Publication, and the Ethics of Citing Black Women’s Intellectual History
Several Black women historians, including Deborah Gray White, Ashley Farmer, and over a dozen scholars who presented at the 40thAnniversary Symposium of the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH) have written about race, gender, and the archive. Recently, these discussions became personal for me when Yoga Journal published pictures from the Library of Congress showing Rosa Parks practicing yoga, without citing my archival research that brought this amazing story to light. In December 2018 at the …
Shining the Light Just Right: Reconstructing the life of “Queen Mother” Audley Moore
One of the twentieth century’s most prominent and prolific activist-intellectuals, Audley Moore was ever present, her ideas and activism forming key infrastructure of the twentieth century Black Freedom Movement.
Call for Essays: Black Women and the Archive
Call for Essays: Black Women and the Archive Description: Members of the Association of Black Women Historians probably know better than most about the challenges, inequities, and frustrations that accompany archival research. At the same time, each one of us has had that research altering find, that reclamation of a sister or a part of history that not only had been long lost, forgotten, or ignored, but that likely ended up …
Andaiye, Caribbean Radicalism, and a Black Woman’s Critical Imprint
Andaiye, one of the co-founders of the political party the Working Peoples Alliance (WPA), in partnership with the late historian and activist Dr. Walter Rodney, died on May 31, 2019. She was a dynamic African-Guyanese activist and intellectual who stood up for the rights of women, children, and the disenfranchised for most of her life. She was a force of nature in Guyanese and global politics. Most well known for …
In Memoriam: Dr. Toni Morrison, 1931-2019
Today we acknowledge the passing of Dr. Toni Morrison. Dr. Morrison was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The author of 11 novels, children’s books, an opera, and critical essays, Dr. Morrison’s haunting, incisive book, Beloved, won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. Her prose powerfully invoked both the awesome beauty and historical torment of Black womanhood in America. Professor Morrison’s work bravely examined enslavement …
Black Women’s Historical Wellness: History as a Tool in Culturally Competent Mental Health Services
Revealing the Rosa Parks yoga picture publicly for the first time underscores the ability of Black women’s historians to inform national effort…