Historians

By: Pero Gaglo Dagbovie

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Historians

On 23 March 1925, roughly thirty years after W. E. B. Du Bois became the first African American historian to receive a PhD, at the age of sixty-six, feminist pioneer, educator, and social activist Anna Julia Cooper, who lived from 1858 to 1964, became the fourth black woman to receive a PhD and the first to receive a PhD within the fields of History and Romance Languages. She earned her doctorate of philosophy from the prestigious University of Paris, the Sorbonne. Her dissertation, written in French, was titled “L'Attitude de la France dans la question de l'esclavage entre 1789 et 1848” (“The Attitude of France on the Question of Slavery between 1789 and 1848”). Cooper conducted meticulous research at the Library of Congress, various French archives, and the Bibliothèque Militaire while immersing herself in the relevant secondary source materials. The leading French historians M. Sagnac, M. Cestre, and M. C. Bougle questioned her during her dissertation defense. Cooper's achievements were remarkable on many levels. The author of the first major black feminist manifesto, A Voice from the South (1892), Cooper did not conform to the “cult of true womanhood,” the prevalent ideology that a woman's place was in the domestic or private sphere. Cooper directly challenged the leading male spokespersons of the Progressive era for their sexism, declaring “only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when and where I enter…then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.’” She maintained this stance throughout her life.

Anna Julia Cooper was an outspoken advocate for the higher education of women and she embraced the National Association of Colored Women's “Lifting as We Climb” motto. She earned her BA and MA degrees in Mathematics and as a doctoral student she studied literature, history, languages (French, Latin, and Greek), and phonetics. She was indeed multidisciplinary in her intellectual approach. Like Du Bois, she combined her knowledge and expertise in history with other fields of intellectual inquiry to forge an original worldview. Moreover, she earned her doctorate while serving as guardian to five grandnieces and grandnephews. Though largely unnoticed in French and U.S. academic circles, Cooper's dissertation candidly critiqued France's and the western world's slaveholding past. Her fundamental argument was that slavery had profoundly impacted French revolutionary political culture and that the French revolutionaries' reluctance to critique slavery fundamentally contradicted their ideas. The tone of Cooper's study is polemical at times, yet she adhered to the historical profession's standards of her times.

The history of black women historians, formally trained like Cooper and self-proclaimed like many others, constitutes a dynamic narrative, challenging readers to revisit the lives and works of lesser known black women scholars and reconceptualize conventional definitions of what makes an historian. Black women historians can be subdivided into four main groups: (1)Progressive-era novelists who published fiction which critically addres-sed important historical subject matter;(2)self-taught, non–PhD holding historians or “historians without portfolio” who produced insightful, accessible, and practical scholarship from the turn of the century until the classic civil rights movement;(3)accomplished and professionally trained scholars, namely Dorothy Porter Wesley and Shirley Graham Du Bois, who, though not formally trained as historians, published historical monographs and engaged in rigorous historical research; and(4)professionally trained, PhD–holding historians.

Early Black Women Historical Writers

The first distinguishable group of black women historians emerged during the late 1800s and the first half of the twentieth century. During the late nineteenth century, several Progressive-era black women novelists, social activists, schoolteachers, and scholars published significant historical scholarship. During the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Depression, black women “historians without portfolio” published noteworthy historical scholarship. From its founding through the 1950s, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) organization provided black female teachers, activists, and professionally trained scholars with a vital arena in which to study and disseminate African American history. Yet, in the decade after Cooper earned her PhD, no black women appear to have earned a PhD in History. This drought in the 1930s was followed by a decade in which the numbers of black female historians increased significantly. In 1940 Marion Thompson Wright became the first black woman historian to earn a PhD in the United States from Columbia University. Other black women followed in her footsteps. In the 1940s, six black women received PhDs in History. Following the modern civil rights movement and the Black Power era, the number of black women historians increased. The Association of Black Women Historians, whose constitution was drafted in 1980, became the first organization for professional black women historians, bringing together the key figures within the black female historical profession. Since then, especially in the course of the mainstreaming of black women's history in the 1980s and 1990s, black women historians proliferated. As black women's history became more sophisticated and popular, many black women acquired prominence in the American historical profession. Several successive generations of black female historians during the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century laid the foundations for the current contributions of black women historians and the present state of the study of black women's history.

During the late nineteenth century, the Progressive-era black women novelists Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, living from 1825 to 1911 and Pauline Hopkins, living from 1859 to 1930, wrote “female-centered,” seemingly unthreatening, “domestic novels” which critically addressed controversial issues and events in U.S. history, such as slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. As Carter G. Woodson would stress more than a decade after these writers' novels appeared, Harper and Hopkins argued that history was instructive because of its direct connection with the present and future. In 1892, Harper's widely circulated Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted addressed many of the complex issues surrounding slavery, the wartime South, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and the historical social responsibility of black reformers. Similarly, Hopkins's Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900) and Winona (1902) discussed the historical realities faced by blacks during the antebellum era, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. From 1900 to 1902, Hopkins published two dozen biographical sketches on well-known African American men and women in the Colored American Magazine. In 1905 Hopkins also published a thirty-one-page booklet, A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants—with Epilogue. Other Progressive-era black women offered their interpretations of history in nonfiction works. In 1894, Gertrude E. H. Bustill Mossell, living from 1855 to 1948, editor, journalist, and feminist, first published The Work of the Afro-American Woman, an historical and contemporary assessment of black women intellectuals' and activists' monumental accomplishments since the era of the American Revolution. Joanne Braxton has posited that this volume “was, for the black woman of the 1890s, the equivalent of [Paula] Giddings' work of the 1980s—in sum, a powerful and progressive statement.”

In the first several decades of the twentieth century, many self-taught black female historians contributed noteworthy autobiographical accounts and popular histories to U.S. and African American historiography. In 1902 Susie King Taylor, living from 1848 to 1912, published the only black woman's account of the Civil War. A Black Woman's Civil War Memoirs recounted her experiences as a laundress and a nurse behind Union lines from about 1862 until 1865. Though not as widely known as Taylor, the Washington, DC, public school teacher Laura Eliza Wilkes, living from 1871 to 1922, also contributed to U.S. military history, becoming the first black woman to chronicle the history of blacks in the military from the colonial era through the War of 1812 in Missing Pages in American History: Revealing the Services of Negroes in the Early Wars of America (1919).

In 1919 the journalist and social activist Delilah Leontium Beasley, living from 1872 to 1934, published The Negro Trail Blazers of California. Beasley was committed to challenging the notion that blacks had not contributed to California's history. Ahead of her time, she drew attention to the African American experience in the West; she employed methodologies of modern historians. Beasley conducted meticulous research at various archives and libraries, interviewed black Californians, examined newspapers, combed through personal papers and memorabilia, and contacted counties in California requesting any materials dealing with African Americans. Several years after Beasley's study appeared, the sociologist Elizabeth Ross Haynes, living from 1883 to 1953, published Unsung Heroes, a 279-page collection of biographical sketches of black historical leaders. Several years later, in 1923, her MA thesis, “Negroes in Domestic Service in the United States,” was published in the Journal of Negro History. In the 1920s and 1930s, the progressive social reformer Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, born in 1855, published two illuminating historical narratives of the lives and works on black clubwomen, The Story of the Illinois Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (1922) and Lifting as They Climb (1933). The latter study constitutes the first major effort at chronicling the contributions of the National Association of Colored Women. It is more than four hundred pages long and is subdivided into seven main parts, covering more than three decades of history, activities, and leadership. As Wanda Hendricks has noted, “much of what we currently know about the early club work of African American women is due to the commitment of Elizabeth Lindsay Davis.” In the mid-1920s, the self-taught historian Drusilla Dunjee Houston, living from 1876 to 1941, became the first black woman to extensively examine ancient African history in her Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire (1926). Houston's study stands as a precursor to the modern black American Afrocentric tradition which has flourished since the Black Power era.

Organizing Historians under the ASNLH

When Houston's book appeared, black women historians, both professionally trained and self-taught, came together under the umbrella of the ASNLH. Woodson welcomed black women into his black history movement and supported their efforts to legitimize and popularize the study of black culture. Black women teachers, club women, librarians, self-taught historians, and social activists all played vital roles in the activities of the ASNLH, especially by the 1930s. Between 1916 and 1950, several outspoken black female leaders and scholars contributed to the Journal of Negro History, including Mary Church Terrell, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Elizabeth Ross Haynes, Dorothy Porter, Zora Neale Hurston, and Mary McLeod Bethune. From the outset, women performed essential behind-the-scenes work in the association's infrastructure. After the founding of Negro History Week in 1926, black women organized activities in schools such as book displays and pageants, promoted annual celebrations and observances, and established active ASNLH branches, history clubs, and study groups throughout the country.

At the state and local levels, black women like Sylvia Tucker, Wilhelmina Crosson, and Jane Dabney Shackelford were among the key organizers and participants in the association's annual meetings, activities, and overall work. During the 1930s and 1940s, Tucker was a key activist in the association's Detroit branch. Founded in 1924, the Detroit branch thrived under Tucker's leadership. Under her guidance and fundraising skills, the Detroit branch grew to an impressive fifteen hundred members. She also introduced association chapters to other parts of Michigan such as Flint, Lansing, Ann Arbor, and Grand Rapids. Tucker has been remembered as being a “spark plug,” a “dynamic leader,” and “Miss Negro History.” Crosson, a member of the Negro History Bulletin's editorial board, a Boston public school teacher, and a member of the ASNLH's executive council, was one of Woodson's most engaged female field researchers. She conducted exhaustive research on the African presence in Mexico during the World War II era. Shackelford, a schoolteacher from Terre Haute, Indiana, and the author of the very popular The Child's Story of the Negro (1938), was “immortal” in Woodson's opinion. In addition to writing several children's books on African American history, she was an enthusiastic and energetic promoter of black history as the head of the Indiana Negro Historical Society, an association branch in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Women's clubs often sponsored events, hosted dinners, and organized the daily activities for the visiting ASNLH conferees. Black women attended all of the association annual meetings, contributed to the lively discussions, and many outspoken black women activists and intellectuals presented papers at association annual meetings, including Sadie Mossell Alexander, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Jane Edna Hunter. In 1935, Lucy Harth Smith and Mary McLeod Bethune became the first black women elected to the ASNLH's executive council.

From 1936 until 1952, Bethune served as the president of the ASNLH. She was a skilled publicist and an adroit fund-raiser for the organization. She was an unwavering supporter of Woodson's quest to popularize black history. As association president, Bethune delivered addresses at annual meetings, five of which were published in the Journal. She argued that black historians needed to arm black children with the knowledge of their past, while underscoring black America's humanity to white society.

Black women were especially active in making the association's Negro History Bulletin a successful vehicle for the dissemination of black history to schools and to a general black readership. From its inception in October 1937, black women occupied significant positions on the magazine's editorial staff. The Bulletin served as an important forum for debate and discussion among female teachers. Images of black women were common in the Bulletin. Black women were also in charge of the Bulletin's popular “Children's Page.” For many years, the renowned artist Lois Mailou Jones worked as the magazine's artist and “Children's Page” coordinator.

As the association matured during the 1930s and 1940s, a cadre of professionally trained black women historians emerged. Other black women, namely Dorothy Burnett Porter Wesley, living from 1905 to 1995, and Shirley Graham Du Bois, living from 1896 to 1977, used their professional training to promote black history. The 1940s proved a watershed for professional black women historians. In this decade alone at least six black women earned PhDs in History. These scholars shared some important traits. Born in the early twentieth century, these trailblazers received their training from some of the most prestigious institutions in the country, often becoming the first black woman to earn doctorates at their respective institutions. They often used the Journal of Negro History and the Journal of Negro Education as outlets for their scholarship. Like their contemporaries John Hope Franklin and Benjamin Quarles, these women tended to write very objective history, a strategy dictated by their times. Not surprisingly, none focused on black women's history. These women often served as mentors for younger black female scholars and they interpreted their roles as teachers very seriously, often pioneering new strategies of education. As female historians, they had to develop mechanisms to cope with the sexism and racism prevalent in American academia. Elsie Lewis's advisor had to seek help from her white advisor in order to gain access to the Arkansas State Archives. Others, like Marion Thompson Wright, had to overcome great obstacles in order to gain promotion and tenure. At the same time, these women were politically and ideologically diverse. Helen G. Edmonds, for instance, was committed to the National Republican Party at a time when most black spokespersons were moving toward the Democratic Party.

Contributions from Related Fields

Unlike their Progressive-era predecessors, Dorothy Burnett Porter Wesley and Shirley Graham Du Bois received extensive training in academic areas other than history and used their expertise to generate significant historical scholarship. From 1930 until 1973, Porter Wesley served as the chief curator for the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Constantly underfunded, Porter Wesley developed into a very resourceful and persistent collector and promoter of African descendants' history and culture. In 1973, her colleague Benjamin Quarles praised her, declaring “without exaggeration, there hasn't been a major black history book in the last 30 years in which the author hasn't acknowledged Mrs. Porter's help.” Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s discovery of Hannah Craft's The Bondwoman's Narrative (written circa 1850s and brought to publication by Gates in 2002) owed a great debt to Porter Wesley; this manuscript was part of her personal collection. Porter Wesley was also a published historian. Before the modern civil rights movement, she compiled many comprehensive bibliographies on black history, her earliest being A Selected History of Books by and about Negroes (1936) and Negro American Poets: A Bibliographic Checklist of Their Writings (1945). In addition, during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Wesley published articles on antebellum black activists in the Journal of Negro Education and the Journal of Negro History.

While they are in the same subgroup, Shirley Graham Du Bois and Porter Wesley adopted divergent approaches to black history. Graham Du Bois's contributions as an historian have been overshadowed by her social and political activism. Yet, between 1944 and 1976, she published thirteen biographies of famous historical figures in African American history, half of which were published between 1944 and 1955. Creative, accessible to a broad readership, and often based upon careful examinations of the available documentation, Graham Du Bois's biographies that were produced during the era of segregation demonstrate her abilities as an historian.

Black Women Historians on College Faculties

In 1940, Marion Thompson Wright, living from 1902 to 1962, became the first black woman to earn a doctorate in history in the United States. Her dissertation, The Education of Negroes in New Jersey, was published in 1941 by the Columbia University Teacher's College Series. After graduating magna cum laude from Howard University in 1927, she earned her MA degree at Howard in Education. In the 1930s, she enrolled in a doctoral program in History and Education at Columbia Teacher's College, where she studied under Merle Curti. While pursuing her doctorate during the Great Depression, Wright worked as a case supervisor for the Newark Department of Public Welfare. In 1940, she joined the faculty at Howard University, setting high standards for her students while inspiring younger black women to consider becoming historians. While at Howard, Wright published articles on blacks in New Jersey in the Journal of Negro History, the Journal of Negro Education (for which she served as the book review editor), and the Journal of Educational Sociology.

Wright's scholarship remains important in the field. Despite significant pioneering accomplishments, Wright faced significant gender discrimination. Her struggle for tenure and promotion to the rank of full professor was long and hard. But her research was important in helping to expose the negative impact of discrimination on U.S. culture, and it helped influence New Jersey's new constitution and the public school desegregation cases decided by the Supreme Court in 1954.

In 1941 Lulu M. Johnson earned a doctorate in History from Iowa State University. Her dissertation was titled “The Problem of Slavery in the Old Northwest, 1787–1858.” This Rockefeller Foundation fellow published a manual entitled The Negro in American Life and taught at West Virginia State College. In the same year that Johnson received her degree, Merze Tate became the first black woman to earn a PhD in Government and International Relations from Harvard University. Though not formally trained as an historian, Tate embraced an interdisciplinary approach. In the 1940s she taught courses in History and published several historical monographs, such as The Disarmament Illusion: The Movement for a Limitation of Armaments to 1907 (1942) and The United States and Armaments (1948). In 1943, Susie Owen Lee received a PhD in history from New York University. She completed a dissertation titled “The Union League of America: Political Activity in Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Virginia, 1865–1870.” Three years later, Elsie Lewis earned a PhD in History from the University of Chicago. She completed her dissertation on the secession movement in Arkansas. This Fisk University graduate published an intriguing article, “The Political Mind of the Negro, 1865–1900,” in the Journal of Southern History in 1955. She was also active within the predominantly white Southern Historical Association. Like Wright, Lewis became an important member of Howard University's History Department, serving as acting chairman for six years.

Helen G. Edmonds, living from 1911 to 1995, received her PhD in History in 1946 from Ohio State University. In 1951 she published her dissertation, The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 1894–1901, a detailed examination of African Americans' role in politics in North Carolina during the pivotal 1890s. Many well-respected reviewers welcomed Edmonds's monograph. Decades later, she published a study on blacks in the government, Black Faces in High Places: Negroes in Government (1971). Edmonds was among the few black historians born during the Progressive era who wrote a monograph focusing on black history during the civil rights movement. Edmonds was also an important presence at North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina. She worked there from 1941 until she retired in 1977. She held a host of positions at NCCU, serving at one point as the chair of the Department of History. A steady supporter of the National Republican Party, she served in the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the National Advisory Council of the Peace Corps, and even as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations. In this case, she preceded Mary Frances Berry, who held U.S. governmental positions during the 1980s and 1990s. The John Hope Franklin Research Collection of African and African American Documentation at Duke University houses the Helen G. Edmonds Papers, 1951–1976, containing four thousand items. In the late 1940s Margaret Nelson Rowley closed out the decade for professionally trained black female historians, earning a PhD from Columbia University.

Civil Rights–Era Historians

During the civil rights movement, several black women historians who came of age in the 1940s remained involved in the profession. Yet, much like the 1930s, the 1950s were challenging years for black women historians. According to the historians August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, the number of black women who earned doctorates during the 1940s “seems to have been a transitory phenomenon and a substantial flow of Negro women PhDs into history does not appear to have resumed until the late 1960s.” Lorraine Williams, living from 1923 to 1996, was among the few black women to earn doctorates in History the 1950s. Williams received her doctorate from American University in 1955. Her focus was on American intellectual history. After earning her BA and MA degrees from Howard University in the mid 1940s, she started her career at her alma mater; she began by teaching a survey course in Social Services and ultimately became a full professor and was chair of the Department of History. During her career, she edited or coauthored eight monographs and published a half a dozen articles, several of which appeared in the Journal of Negro Education, a popular outlet for black women historians. Williams was also a social activist. During the 1960s she “taught in an experimental program for disadvantaged students” at Howard. In addition, she was active in organizations such as the Urban League, the National Council of Negro Women, the Black Woman's Agenda, the American Council of Human Rights, and the NAACP. According to Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Janice Sumler-Edmond, Williams was a “pioneering female professor and university administrator” who “mentored hundreds of students” and helped popularize the Journal of Negro History, for which she served as editor. In 1977, she edited a popular monograph, Africa and the Afro-American Experience: Eight Essays.

Towards the end of the civil rights movement and the emergence of the Black Power era, few black women earned PhDs in history. Among them was Mary Frances Berry, who received a PhD in Constitutional History from the University of Michigan in 1966. Berry also earned a doctorate of Jurisprudence. Berry “both writes and makes history,” Genna Rae McNeil has noted. Among her mentors were the Howard University professors Elsie Lewis and Lorraine Williams. During the 1970s, she published several important articles and monographs. Her classic volume published during the Black Power era was Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism (1971). Berry also held various administrative positions in the 1970s, and beyond, at major research institutions.

The ABWH and Formally Trained Black Women Historians

By the 1970s, many key developments had contributed to the rise of professionally trained black female historians. During the Black Power era, black student activism reached a peak and thousands of black students at predominantly white institutions initiated the Black Studies movement. The study of history was considered one of the most important disciplines. A budding Black Women's History and Studies movement coincided with these trends. Many black women historians and scholars published major studies on black women during the post–Black Power era 1970s and 1980s. Among those to contribute important historical scholarship on black women in the 1970s were Angela Davis, Gerda Lerner (a white female), Sharon Harley, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Debra L. Newman, and Darlene Clark Hine. This revisionist scholarship, epitomized by Harley and Terborg-Penn's anthology The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978), signaled the emergence of this field. Another important development occurred in 1979 when black women historians created the Association of Black Women Historians, Inc. (ABWH). In 1977 Terborg-Penn, Eleanor Smith, and Elizabeth Parker called for the creation of this organization and in February 1979, the governing rules, regulations, and foundations of the organization were in place.

In 1980 the ABWH's constitution was adopted and the organization was incorporated. The organization's first national director was Terborg-Penn. According to Francille Rusan Wilson, the ABWH has a “dual identity,” serving as a “professional home for black women who are historians, and the central location of support of historical research on black women.” In the words of one of its early members, “the ABWH became the institutional infrastructure of the black women's history movement just as the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History…served as the organizational foundation for the Black History Movement.” Since the 1980s, the group has engaged in practical work such as networking, mentoring younger scholars in the field, defining the field of black women's history, promoting scholarship and research within black women's history, and offering support for black women historians.

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed watershed developments in black women's history and the black female historical profession. In the 1980s important monographs were published in the field of black women's history, including Hine's When the Truth Is Told: Black Women's Culture and Community in Indiana, 1890–1950 (1981) and Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950 (1989); Dorothy Sterling's We Are Your Sisters: Black Women and the Nineteenth Century (1984); Beverly Guy-Sheftall's “Daughters of Sorrow”: Attitudes towards Black Women, 1880–1920 (1984); Paula Giddings's When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984); Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I A Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985); Jacqueline Jones's Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1986); Jacqueline Rouse's Lugenia Burns Hope: Black Southern Reformer (1989); and Cynthia Neverdon-Morton's African American Women and the Advancement of the Race in the South, 1895–1925 (1989). White's path-breaking monograph on black women slaves in the plantation South was one of the first major studies in black women's history. Her research and publication possessed enormous implications for the field. Her monograph challenged the many male-centered studies on U.S. slavery. Prior to the publication of Ar'n't I A Woman?, historians ignored the distinctly unique female slave experience. White's study contributed to the development of microstudies within the dynamic slavery historiography. White also demonstrated to her colleagues, as she stressed in a 1987 Journal of American History article, that a careful examination of manuscript collections and the WPA Slave Narrative Collection could help “rescue black women from their submergence and invisibility.”

By the 1980s black women historians were in key positions at leading colleges and universities throughout the nation. Among those high-ranking black female historians active during the Reagan years were Mary Frances Berry (who even sued the fortieth president), Elsa Barkley Brown, Bettye Collier-Thomas, Paula Giddings, Sharon Harley, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Darlene Clark Hine, Nell Irvin Painter, Linda Reed, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, and Deborah Gray White. In the late 1980s, three black women historians received chaired professorships: Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania; Painter, Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton; and Hine, John A. Hannah Professor of History at Michigan State University.

In the 1990s black women's history acquired legitimacy as a recognized field of scholarly inquiry. In the spring of 1990 Mary Frances Berry served as the president of the Organization of American Historians, the first black woman to achieve such a recognition within the historical profession. Moreover, Darlene Clark Hine built upon the works of black women who entered the field in the 1970s and 1980s. With others, and in collaboration with the publisher Ralph Carlson, she institutionalized and validated black women's history. During the 1990s not only were more key monographs published by black women historians than ever before, but important research materials were also made accessible. The sixteen-volume Black Women in the United States (1990), Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1993), and “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: A Reader in Black Women's History (1995) are among those efforts. Among the significant monographs by black women historians of the 1990s are Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1993); Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, DC, 1910–1940 (1994); Stephanie Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era (1996); Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (1996); Tera Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (1997); Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women and the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (1998); Wanda Hendricks, Race, Gender, and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women in Illinois (1998); Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (1998); Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (1999); and Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (1999). Other recent studies by black women historians include Ula Yvette Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (2002); and Johnnetta Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women's Equality in African American Communities (2003). Following in the footsteps of Mary Frances Berry and other black female historians who have risen to high administrative positions, Darlene Clark Hine marked several important milestones by becoming president of the Organization of American Historians (2001–2002) and also president of the Southern Historical Association (2002–2003).

Many promising black women historians were also born during the Black Power era. Often mentored by the black women historians who came of age during the civil rights and Black Power movements, these black women historians of the “hip-hop generation” began to make their names known in the early twenty-first century.

The history of black women historians constitutes a dynamic narrative. It is a history of struggle, perseverance, and great accomplishments. In the early twentieth century, when the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association were founded, few would have ever imagined that black women would rise to serve as their presidents. The achievements of black women historians gives credence to Nannie Helen Burroughs's dictum, “we specialize in the wholly impossible.”

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