Beth Howse: The Pricelessness of an Archivist

Behind every archival find is an archivist. Beth Howse was mine.  If, for more than four decades until her passing in September 2012, you were ever a researcher in the Special Collections and Archives at Fisk University’s John and Aurelia Hope Franklin Library in Nashville, Tennessee, the name Beth Madison Howse is no stranger to you.  A fourth-generation Fiskite, her maternal great-grandmother Ella Sheppard entered the Fisk Free Colored School …

The Haunting of the Archives

Toward the end of my undergraduate studies I stumbled (literally) into a sign that would drastically alter my destiny. As a night out with friends drew to a close, I walked into a historical sign marking the sight of where the former North Carolina Eugenics Board (NCEB) had held its bimonthly meetings. That sign haunted me in the days and week after. I wanted to uncover the story of the …

Unita Blackwell’s Afro-Asian Internationalism

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, …

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 …

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 …