Black Women In The Ivory Tower 1850 1954

Evans chronicles the stories of African American women who struggled for and won access to formal education, beginning in 1850, when Lucy Stanton, a student at Oberlin College, earned the first college diploma conferred on an African American woman. In the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, a critical increase in black women's educational attainment mirrored unprecedented national growth in American education. Evans reveals how black women demanded space as students and asserted their voices as educators--despite such barriers as violence, discrimination, and oppressive campus policies--contributing in significant ways to higher education in the United States. She argues that their experiences, ideas, and practices can inspire contemporary educators to create an intellectual democracy in which all people have a voice. Among those Evans profiles are Anna Julia Cooper, who was born enslaved yet ultimately earned a doctoral degree from the Sorbonne, and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College. Exposing the hypocrisy in American assertions of democracy and discrediting European notions of intellectual superiority, Cooper argued that all human beings had a right to grow. Bethune believed that education is the right of all citizens in a democracy. Both women's philosophies raised questions of how human and civil rights are intertwined with educational access, scholarly research, pedagogy, and community service. This first complete educational and intellectual history of black women carefully traces quantitative research, explores black women's collegiate memories, and identifies significant geographic patterns in America's institutional development. Evans reveals historic perspectives, patterns, and philosophies in academia that will be an important reference for scholars of gender, race, and education.

Winner, 2019 Anna Julia Cooper and C.L.R. James Award, given by the National Council for Black Studies Finalist, 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History, given by the African American Intellectual History Society Winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award, given by the History of Education Society The inspiring story of the black students, faculty, and administrators who forever changed America’s leading educational institutions and paved the way for social justice and racial progress The eight elite institutions that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the Ancient Eight—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell—are American stalwarts that have profoundly influenced history and culture by producing the nation’s and the world’s leaders. The few black students who attended Ivy League schools in the decades following WWII not only went on to greatly influence black America and the nation in general, but unquestionably awakened these most traditional and selective of American spaces. In the twentieth century, black youth were in the vanguard of the black freedom movement and educational reform. Upending the Ivory Tower illuminates how the Black Power movement, which was borne out of an effort to edify the most disfranchised of the black masses, also took root in the hallowed halls of America’s most esteemed institutions of higher education. Between the close of WWII and 1975, the civil rights and Black Power movements transformed the demographics and operation of the Ivy League on and off campus. As desegregators and racial pioneers, black students, staff, and faculty used their status in the black intelligentsia to enhance their predominantly white institutions while advancing black freedom. Although they were often marginalized because of their race and class, the newcomers altered educational policies and inserted blackness into the curricula and culture of the unabashedly exclusive and starkly white schools. This book attempts to complete the narrative of higher education history, while adding a much needed nuance to the history of the Black Power movement. It tells the stories of those students, professors, staff, and administrators who pushed for change at the risk of losing what privilege they had. Putting their status, and sometimes even their lives, in jeopardy, black activists negotiated, protested, and demonstrated to create opportunities for the generations that followed. The enrichments these change agents made endure in the diversity initiatives and activism surrounding issues of race that exist in the modern Ivy League. Upending the Ivory Tower not only informs the civil rights and Black Power movements of the postwar era but also provides critical context for the Black Lives Matter movement that is growing in the streets and on campuses throughout the country today. As higher education continues to be a catalyst for change, there is no one better to inform today’s activists than those who transformed our country’s past and paved the way for its future.

The field of black women's history gained recognition as a legitimate field of study late in the twentieth century. Collecting stories that are both deeply personal and powerfully political, Telling Histories compiles seventeen personal narratives by leading black women historians at various stages in their careers, illuminating how they entered and navigated higher education, a world concerned with - and dominated by - whites and men. In distinct voices and from different vantage points, the personal histories revealed here also tell the story of the struggle to establish the fields of African American and African American women's history.

Black women in higher education continue to experience colder institutional climates that devalue their presence. They are relied on to mentor students and expected to commit to service activities that are not rewarded in the tenure process and often lack access to knowledgeable mentors to offer career support. There is a need to move beyond the individual resistance strategies employed by Black women to institutional and policy changes in higher education institutions. Specifically, higher education policymakers and administrators should understand and acknowledge how the race and gender makeup of campuses and departments impact the successes and failures of Black women as they work to recruit and retain Black women graduate students, faculty, and administrators. Black Women Navigating Historically White Higher Education Institutions and the Journey Toward Liberation provides a collection of ethnographies, case studies, narratives, counter-stories, and quantitative descriptions of Black women's intersectional experience learning, teaching, serving, and leading in higher education. This publication also provides an opportunity for Black women to identify the systems that impede their professional growth and development in higher education institutions and articulate how they navigate racist and sexist forces to find their versions of success. Covering a range of topics such as leadership, mental health, and identity, this reference work is ideal for higher education professionals, policymakers, administrators, researchers, scholars, practitioners, academicians, instructors, and students.

Histories of Architecture Education in the United States is an edited collection focused on the professional evolution, experimental and enduring pedagogical approaches, and leading institutions of American architecture education. Beginning with the emergence of architecture as a profession in Philadelphia and ending with the early work, but unfinished international effort, of making room for women and people of color in positions of leadership in the field, this collection offers an important history of architecture education relevant to audiences both within and outside of the United States. Other themes include the relationship of professional organizations to educational institutions; the legacy of late nineteenth-century design concepts; the role of architectural history; educational changes and trans-Atlantic intellectual exchanges after WWII and the Cold War; the rise of the city and urban design in the architect’s consciousness; student protests and challenges to traditional architecture education; and the controversial appearance of environmental activism. This collection, in other words, provides a relevant history of the present, with topics of concern to all architects studying and working today.

The field of black women's history gained recognition as a legitimate field of study late in the twentieth century. Collecting stories that are both deeply personal and powerfully political, Telling Histories compiles seventeen personal narratives by leading black women historians at various stages in their careers, illuminating how they entered and navigated higher education, a world concerned with - and dominated by - whites and men. In distinct voices and from different vantage points, the personal histories revealed here also tell the story of the struggle to establish the fields of African American and African American women's history.

When Sharde M. Davis turned to social media during the summer of racial reckoning in 2020, she meant only to share how racism against Black people affects her personally. But her hashtag, BlackintheIvory, went viral, fostering a flood of Black scholars sharing similar stories. Soon the posts were being quoted during summer institutes and workshops on social justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. And in fall 2020, faculty assigned the tweets as material for course curriculum. This curated collection of original personal narratives from Black scholars across the country seeks to continue the conversation that started with BlackintheIvory. Put together, the stories reveal how racism eats its way through higher education, how academia systemically ejects Black scholars in overt and covert ways, and how academic institutions—and their individual members—might make lasting change. While anti-Black racism in academia is a behemoth with many entry points to the conversation, this book marshals a diverse group of Black voices to bring to light what for too long has been hidden in the shadow of the ivory tower.

This edited collection illustrates the way in which women’s experiences of academe could be both contextually diverse but historically and culturally similar. It looks at both the micro (individual women and universities) and macro-level (comparative analyses among regions and countries) within regional, national, trans-national, and international contexts. The contributors integrally advance knowledge about the university in history by exploring the intersections of the lived experiences of women students and professors, practices of co-education, and intellectual and academic cultures. They also raise important questions about the complementary and multidirectional flow and exchange of academic knowledge and information among gender groups across programmes, disciplines, and universities. Historical inquiry and interpretation serve as efficacious ways with which to understand contemporary events and discourses in higher education, and more broadly in community and society. This book will provide important historical contexts for current debates about the numerical dominance and significance of women in higher education, and the tensions embedded in the gendering of specific academic programs and disciplines, and university policies, missions, and mandates.