New York City’s Ethical Culture Fieldston School used a photo of an African American woman instructing one of the school’s students during the early 1930s as part of a “centennial narrative on inclusion.” Use of the image, taken by photographer Lewis Hine, gave the impression that the school had an African American teacher on staff. The teacher, Mildred Louise Johnson, was a student in their Teacher Training Department (TTD). Prior …
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 …
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, …
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 …