The Journal of African American History

CARTER G. WOODSON DISTINGUISHED LECTURERS
2004-2006

The Association for the Study of African American Life and History and The Journal of African American History are pleased to present the list of the Carter G. Woodson Distinguished Lecturers for 2004-2006. These lecturers are among the leading scholars in the field of African American history and culture.

We hope that you will begin to make plans to bring one of these speakers to your campus, institution, or fundraising activity for your ASALH branch or local cultural organization. Lecture sponsors agree to pay $1,000 lectureship fee to The Journal of African American History ($500 of which will go to the speaker) as well as the lecturer's travel and lodging expenses (if any).

This is an important way to help support the ongoing activities of The Journal of African American History.

The Association for the Study of African American Life and History
CB Powell Building
525 Bryant Street, NW Suite C142
Washington, DC 20059

Telephone 202-865-0053
Fax: 202-265-7920

executivedirector@asalh.net
Editorial Office: JAAH@dillard.edu
Website: http://www.asalh.org

For Information on the Journal contact:

The Journal of African American History
African World Studies
Dillard University
2601 Gentilley Blvd.
New Orleans, LA 70122

Telephone: 504-816-4672

Dr. V.P. Franklin, Editor
vpfranklin@dillard.edu
 vpf9@columbia.edu
Editorial Office: JAAH@tc.edu
Website: http://iume.tc.columbia.edu/jaah/

 

Derrick Alridge, University of Georgia

  • “W.E.B. DuBois and the Education of Black People”
  • “Hip Hop As a Social and Intellectual Movement”
  • “Metaphors and Symbolic Representations of Blacks in U.S. History Textbooks”

Dr. Derrick P. Alridge is Associate Professor of Social Foundations of Education at the University of Georgia, Athens. His areas of scholarship include the history of U.S. African American education, civil rights studies, and hip hop studies. He is currently co-director of the Foot Soldier Project for Civil Rights Studies at UGA--a research project that produces historical documentaries on the Civil Rights Movement in Georgia. Professor Alridge's work has been published in a variety of journals, including The Journal of African American History, The Journal of Negro Education, and The Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment.

 

 

Felix Armfield, Buffalo State College/SUNY

  • “Eugene Kinckle Jones and the Founding of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity”
  • “Eugene Kinckle Jones and Black Social Work”
  • “Black Social Work Education and the Supreme Court’s Gaines v. Missouri Decision, 1938”

Dr. Felix Armfield is Associate Professor of History at Buffalo State College in the Department of History and Social Studies Education.  He also was a member of the faculty of Western Illinois University from 1995 to 2000.  Most recently, he published the book Black Life in West Central Illinois (2001), and is presently working on a biography of Eugene Kinckle Jones, a black social work pioneer in the early twentieth century and the first Executive Secretary of the National Urban League, 1916-1940.

 

 

Deidre Hill Butler, Union College

  • “Activist Mothering in African American Families”
  • “The Split: A Womanist Interpretation of an Episode of Suburban Black Community Reconfiguration, 1904-1920”
  • “Having Our Say: Teaching Black Studies to Our Community and Beyond”

Dr. Deidre Hill Butler came to Union College from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she earned her Ph.D.  Dr. Butler's research interests include the social geography of race, class, and gender in African American social institutions in New England and the role of African American women in contemporary stepfamilies. She has received recognition for her scholarship from the New York African-American Institute and the Massachusetts Historical League. Dr. Butler has severed on the Program Committee for the Association of Black Sociologists and the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, and is a member of the American Sociological Association. She is an active member of the Black Women Health Project, a national black women’s grassroots health initiative. Dr.  Butler contributed an essay to the 2003 ASALH Black History Kit, Souls of Black Folk: Centennial Reflections.

 

 

Gloria Harper Dickinson, The College of New Jersey

  • “From Goobers to Gumbo: Foodways of Africa and the Diaspora”
  • “Marketing Afrocentricity: A Global Retrospect”

Dr. Dickinson is the Chair of The College of New Jersey’s Department of African American Studies, President of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, International Recording Secretary of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., and webmaster for the Association of Black Women Historians.  Dr. Dickinson’s spheres of academic expertise include Africana literature and religion, black popular culture, women writers of the African Diaspora, and New Media & Africana Studies.  Her analysis of the popular culture and cuisines of Diaspora people; the literature, history, and contemporary activities of women of African descent; and the Africana presence on the Information Superhighway have been informed and enriched through extensive travel and lecturing in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, Asia, and the Americas.

 

 

De Witt S. Dykes, Jr., Oakland University

  • “African American Family History and Genealogy”
  • “The Underground Railroad in History and in Memory” (illustrated with slides)
  • “How Africans Became African Americans: Family, Culture, and Continuity”

Dr. De Witt S. Dykes, Jr., is Associate Professor of History at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, specializing in African American history, family history, and genealogy.  Dr. Dykes is author of numerous articles in the Dictionary of American Biography, Notable Black American Women, Notable Black American Men, and Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, and has published scholarly essays in various books on African American and family history.

 

 

Sheila Y. Flemming, Bethune-Cookman College

  • “Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune: The Public and Private Icon”
  • “And Justice for ALL: Reparations for African Americans”
  • “Women in the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa”

Dr. Sheila Y. Flemming is Dean of the Social Sciences Division, Professor of History, and Executive Assistant to the President for the College Centennial at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Florida.  She received her Ph.D. from Howard University and is author of Bethune-Cookman College 1904-1994: An Answered Prayer to a Dream (1995).  Dr. Flemming has written and lectured extensively on Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, women in Africa, reparations, and African American leadership, and is the incoming President of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

 

 

David Barry Gaspar, Duke University

  • “Meaning, Purpose, and Practice: Carter G. Woodson and ‘Scientific’ Black History”
  • “The Visible Hand: Carter G. Woodson and the Shaping of the Journal of Negro History, 1916-1926”
  • “Carter G. Woodson, The Journal of Negro History, and the Early Scholarship of Eric Williams”

Dr. Gaspar was born in St.Lucia in the West Indies and pursued undergraduate studies at the College of the Virgin Islands and at the University of the West Indies.  He received his Ph. D. in history in 1974 from Johns Hopkins University.  His research interests are related to the development of the Atlantic World since 1400, with particular emphasis on the significance of the African Diaspora. Among his published works are Bondman and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua (1993), and the coedited volumes More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (1996) and A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (2003).  He recently (2003) founded and edits the academic periodical Contours: A Journal of the African Diaspora.  Dr. Gaspar has taught at the University of the West Indies, the University of Virginia, Michigan State University, and since 1980 at Duke University.

 

 

Robert C. Hayden, University of Massachusetts Boston

  • “African Americans in Science, Technology, and Medicine”
  • “Using Carter G. Woodson’s Life and Work to Rethink and Revamp Public High School History Courses”
  • “The Boston Riot of 1903: B.T. Washington vs. William Monroe Trotter and the Radicalization of William E. B. Du Bois”

Mr. Robert C. Hayden is a Lecturer in African American history and urban studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He taught in the Black Studies Program at Boston College from l983 to l993; in 2001 he retired as a Senior Lecturer in African American history at Northeastern University. Mr. Hayden is the author of sixteen books and publications, including Mr. Harlem Hospital: Dr. Louis T. Wright: A Biography, African Americans in Boston: More Than Three Hundred Fifty Years, and important books on African Americans in science, technology, and medicine.  In l994 to 1995 he was a Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and currently serves as the Secretary of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and the founding president of the Martha's Vineyard Branch.

 

 

Walter Hill, National Archives and Records Administration

  • “African American Historical Research at the National Archives and Records Administration”
  • “The Documentation of African American History in Federal Records”

Dr. Walter B. Hill, Jr., is a Senior Archivist and Subject Area Specialist at the National Archives and Records Administration.  He specializes in the documentation of African Americans in federal records.  He has been with the National Archives and Records Administration since 1978, and has held numerous archival positions.  He received his Ph.D. in American History from the University of Maryland, College Park.  Since 1984 he has been an Adjunct Professor in the Afro-American Studies Department at Howard University.  He has held teaching positions at Northern Illinois University, St. Louis University, and the University of Maryland.  He has published numerous articles in the area of archives and history with specific focus on Afro-American life, history, and culture. 

 

 

David Jackson, Florida A&M University

  • “Reassessing America’s Most Powerful Black Leader: Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Machine”
  • “Charles Banks and African American Entrepreneurs in the Age of Jim Crow”
  • “A Radical Preacher Activist: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner”

Dr. David Jackson received his B.S. degree in History and Education and a master's degree in Public Administration from Florida A&M University.  He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Memphis.  He is currently Associate Professor of History at Florida A&M University, where he won the Rattler Pride Award for Community Leadership and the Teacher of the Year Award (1999-2000).  He has published several articles and books, including A Chief Lieutenant of the Tuskegee Machine: Charles Banks of Mississippi (2002).

 

 

Ida E. Jones, Howard University

  • “Joel 2:28: Let Your Sons and Daughters Prophesy: African American Church Founders Bishop Mary Magdelena Tate and Bishop Ida B. Robinson”
  • “Carter G. Woodson from Education of the Negro to Miseducation of the Negro: Understanding the Internal Decline of African American Leadership”
  • “The Light Within: African American Churches and Archives”

Dr. Ida E. Jones is a native of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is currently the senior manuscript librarian in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.  She is a graduate of Howard University with a B.A. in Journalism (1992) and a Ph.D. (2001).  Her field of study centers around African American religion and historic records preservation, and her research examines the role of the church within African American culture and the American political economy.  She has worked with a number of churches to preserve their records and promote understanding of their historical importance in American urban history.  Dr. Jones is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of History at Howard University, and currently serves as co-editor of the Black History Bulletin (the Negro History Bulletin). 

 

 

Benjamin Justesen, GED Testing Service

  • “George Henry White: The Man and the Myth”
  • “Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall of the National Afro-American Council, 1898-1908”
  • “George White, Josephus Daniels, and the Showdown Over Disfranchisement, 1900”

Mr. Benjamin Justesen is special projects director for the GED Testing Service, Washington, DC, and has been a print journalist, businessman, teacher, and U.S. diplomat.  He completed graduate work in political science at North Carolina State University and journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is the author of George Henry White: An Even Chance in the Race of Life (2001), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in biography.  He is currently compiling a collection of White’s writings and speeches and working on a biographical directory of North Carolina’s African American officeholders, 1868-1901.

 

 

Tony Martin, Wellesley College

  • “Marcus Garvey’s Vision and Impact”
  • “The Battle for Black History: Two Hundred Years of Struggle”
  • “The Pan-African Movement”

Dr. Tony Martin is a Professor of African Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and has taught at the University of Michigan-Flint, the Cipriani Labour College (Trinidad), and St. Mary's College (Trinidad). He has been a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, Brandeis University, Brown University, and The Colorado College. He also spent a year as an honorary research fellow at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad. Dr. Martin has authored, compiled, or edited eleven books, including Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts and the Harlem Renaissance, and the classic study of the Garvey Movement, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association.  Dr. Martin also qualified as a barrister-at-law at the Honourable Society of Gray's Inn (London) in 1965, did a B.Sc. honors degree in economics at the University of Hull (England), and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in history at Michigan State University.

 

 

Audrey Thomas McCluskey, Indiana University

  • “Lucy Craft Laney and Mary McLeod Bethune: Progenitors of Black Women Leadership”
  • “Lucy Craft Laney: Early Black Feminist?”
  • “Fredi Washington and Hattie McDaniel and the Embodiment of Black Female Performance in 1930s Hollywood”

Dr. Audrey Thomas McCluskey is an Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Director of the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University.  Her research bridges the intersections of historical and cultural studies to focus on women educators, particularly school founders, as cultural agents and institution builders. She examines their work as models for nation building that reside in domestic and gendered notions of leadership, family, and race. Dr. McCluskey’s research and teaching has also been in the area of cultural studies, specifically the embodiment of black female performance in early "race" and Hollywood films.

 

 

Gregory Mixon, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
  • “African American Personhood and the Civil War”
  • “The Community and Individual: Black Union History, Public Policy, and the Atlanta Riot of 1906”
  • “The Atlanta Riot and the History of Race Riots in the United States”

Dr. Gregory Mixon is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He received his Ph. D. in history from the University of Cincinnati. His research interests include African American and United States history, Latin American history, and community planning; he is the author of the forthcoming book The Atlanta Riot, "A Memorandum to Armageddon”: Race, Class and Violence in a New South City. A new research project focuses on “Black Southern State Militias, 1865-1910.” Dr. Mixon has published articles in the Journal of Negro History, Georgia Historical Quarterly and Atlanta History: A Journal of Georgia and the South.

 

 

Kim Pearson, The College of New Jersey

  • “The Journalism of W.E.B. Du Bois”
  • “(Re)Covering Hamlet: Lessons from the Imperial Foods Fire”

Ms. Kim Pearson is Assistant Professor of Journalism at The College of New Jersey.   In 2000, she was named the New Jersey Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.  She is the author of numerous articles that have appeared in Emerge, Crisis Magazine, and The Quarterly Black Review of Books.  Ms. Pearson was a contributor to The Souls of Black Folk: Centennial Reflections, the first interactive ASALH Black History Month Kit.

 

 

Brenda Gayle Plummer, University of Wisconsin-Madison

  • “African Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs”
  • “Race and Gender in the Cold War Era”
  • “African Americans in Diaspora Perspective”

Dr. Brenda Gayle Plummer teaches in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  She has also held positions at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fisk University. Plummer received her Ph.D. from Cornell University.  She has published Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988 (2003); Rising Wind: Black Americans and U. S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (1996); Haiti and the United States (1992); and Haiti and the Great Powers, 1902-1915 (1988).

 

 

Brenda Stevenson, University of California, Los Angeles

  • “Sally Hemmings: Slave Maiden, Memory and Mystery”
  • "Laboring Women: Slave Women and the Southern Economy”

Dr. Brenda E. Stevenson is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.  She received her Ph.D. in American History from Yale University.  Her work centers on the 18th and 19th century South, particularly the social and work world of slave men, women, and children.  Her major publications include Life in Black and White:  Family and Community in the Slave South and The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké.  She currently is completing a book on slave women in the American South from the colonial to the antebellum eras.

 

 

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Morgan State University

  • “Black Women in the Woman Suffrage Movement”
  • “Intersections of Identity and Politics: 1920s Elite Black Women”

Dr. Terborg-Penn is a Professor of History at Morgan State University, and Coordinator of Graduate Programs in History.  She received her Ph. D. in Afro-American History from Howard University, and is the co-founder of the Association of Black Women Historians.  She is the editor of several books on African American women's history and the author of African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (1998).

 

 

Robert Smith, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

  • “African Americans and the Legal Process: Promises Still to Keep”
  • “Race and Law in American Society”
  • “Post-Civil War Rights Era Legal Activism”

Dr. Robert S. Smith is an Assistant Professor at UNC at Charlotte in the Department of African American and Africa Studies. Dr. Smith is a legal historian with a particular interest in post-civil rights era legal activism in the black community. Dr. Smith is currently completing a book on Race, Labor & Civil Rights: Griggs v. Duke Power and the Expansion of Equal Employment Opportunity.

 

 

Richard Brent Turner, University of Iowa

  • “Islam in the African American Experience: Past, Present, and Future”
  • “Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Hip Hop Culture”
  • “Black New Orleans and the African Diaspora”

Dr. Richard Brent Turner is Associate Professor in the departments of African American World Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Iowa.  He holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Religion from Princeton University, an M.A. degree in Afro-American Studies from Boston University, and has been an associate at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African-American Research at Harvard University.  Professor Turner's publications include Islam in the African American Experience (second edition, 2003), and numerous articles, book chapters, and book reviews on African American religion that have appeared in The Journal of Religious Thought, Journal of Ritual Studies, The Black Perspective in Music, Journal of African-American History, The Muslim World, Middle East Affairs Journal, and The American Historical Review.  He is currently working on a book on New Orleans and the African Diaspora.

 

 

Sheila S. Walker, Spelman College

  • “Okra Gumbo and Banjo: Everyday Africa in the Americas”
  • “Gold, Rice, and Bugs Bunny: Africa’s Brain Drain and the Creation of the Americas”
  • “Scattered Africa: Faces and Voices of the African Diaspora" (with video presentation)

Dr. Sheila S. Walker is the William and Camille Cosby Endowed Professor in the Social Sciences at Spelman College. She has done extensive field research and participated in cultural activities throughout Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas.  She edited African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas (2001) and the accompanying video documentary Scattered Africa: Faces and Voices of the African Diaspora (2002). In 1996 she organized an international conference on The African Diaspora and the Modern World with the co-sponsorship of UNESCO, and she is currently developing visual documentation of the African Diaspora in the Americas.

 

 

Lillian S. Williams, University of Buffalo

  • “Mary Burnett Talbert: American Visionary”
  • “African American Women and Reform”
  • “Blacks in Urban America”

Dr. Lillian S. Williams is Chair and Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. Until recently, Dr. Williams was Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University at Albany, where she also was director of the Institute for Research on Women. She is author of Strangers in the Land of Paradise: The Creation of an African American Community, Buffalo, New York, 1900-1940.  Her current research has been on African American women and the club movement, and she is completing a book on Blacks in Green: African Americans in the Girl Scout Movement.

 

 

Yohuru Williams, Delaware State University

  • “Color, Features, and Hair: Rethinking Race in the 21st Century”
  • “In Defense of Self-Defense: The Black Panther Party in History and Memory”
  • “Permission to Hate: Lynching and the Law, 1865-1930”

Dr. Yohuru Williams is Associate Professor of History and Director of Black Studies at Delaware State University.  He received his Ph.D. from Howard University in 1998.  Dr. Williams is the author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven (2000) and A Constant Struggle: African-American History from 1865 to the Present, Documents and Essays (2002). He also served as general editor for the ASALH’s 2002 and 2003 Black History Month Kits, The Color Line Revisited and The Souls of Black Folks: Centennial Reflections. Dr. Williams's scholarly articles have appeared in The Black Scholar, The Journal of Black Studies, and The Black History Bulletin.  Dr. Williams presently working on a book on African American political activism in Delaware.

 

 

Zachery Williams, Ithaca College

  • “Black Public Intellectuals, Past and Present (Including Black Religious Intellectuals)”
  • “Africana Policy Studies”
  • “Black Men’s Studies: The Making of a Radical Tradition and Paradigm”

Dr. Zachery Williams is an Assistant Professor of African New World Studies at Ithaca College and a minister with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Ithaca, New York.  Dr. Williams received his Ph. D. in history from Bowling Green State University.  He has worked in the areas of “Black Masculinist Thought” and “Africana Policy Studies” and is currently completing a book titled In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race in Academia, 1926-1970.