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.

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.

A new edition of a landmark work on Black women's intellectual traditions. An astonishing wealth of literary and intellectual work by nineteenth-century black women is being rediscovered and restored to print. In Kristin B. Waters's and Carol B. Conaway's landmark edited collection, Black Women's Intellectual Traditions, sophisticated commentary on this rich body of work chronicles a powerful and interwoven legacy of activism based on social and political theories that helped shape the history of North America. Black Women's Intellectual Traditions meticulously reclaims this American legacy, providing a collection of critical analyses of the primary sources and their vital traditions. Written by leading scholars, this book is particularly powerful in its exploration of the pioneering thought and action of the nineteenth-century Black woman lecturer and essayist Maria W. Stewart, abolitionist Sojourner Truth, novelist and poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, educator Anna Julia Cooper, newspaper editor Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and activist Ida B. Wells. The volume will interest scholars and readers of African American and women's studies, history, rhetoric, literature, poetry, sociology, political science, and philosophy. This updated edition features a new preface by the editors in light of current scholarship.

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.

Despite recent advances in the study of black thought, black women intellectuals remain often neglected. This collection of essays by fifteen scholars of history and literature establishes black women's places in intellectual history by engaging the work of writers, educators, activists, religious leaders, and social reformers in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. Dedicated to recovering the contributions of thinkers marginalized by both their race and their gender, these essays uncover the work of unconventional intellectuals, both formally educated and self-taught, and explore the broad community of ideas in which their work participated. The end result is a field-defining and innovative volume that addresses topics ranging from religion and slavery to the politicized and gendered reappraisal of the black female body in contemporary culture. Contributors are Mia E. Bay, Judith Byfield, Alexandra Cornelius, Thadious Davis, Corinne T. Field, Arlette Frund, Kaiama L. Glover, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, Natasha Lightfoot, Sherie Randolph, Barbara D. Savage, Jon Sensbach, Maboula Soumahoro, and Cheryl Wall.

How have Black women elders managed stress? In Black Women's Yoga History, Stephanie Y. Evans uses primary sources to answer that question and to show how meditation and yoga from eras of enslavement, segregation, and migration to the Civil Rights, Black Power, and New Age movements have been in existence all along. Life writings by Harriet Jacobs, Sadie and Bessie Delany, Eartha Kitt, Rosa Parks, Jan Willis, and Tina Turner are only a few examples of personal case studies that are included here, illustrating how these women managed traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression. In more than fifty yoga memoirs, Black women discuss practices of reflection, exercise, movement, stretching, visualization, and chanting for self-care. By unveiling the depth of a struggle for wellness, memoirs offer lessons for those who also struggle to heal from personal, cultural, and structural violence. This intellectual history expands conceptions of yoga and defines inner peace as mental health, healing, and wellness that is both compassionate and political.

Black Women and Social Justice Education explores Black women's experiences and expertise in teaching and learning about justice in a range of formal and informal educational settings. Linking historical accounts with groundbreaking contributions by new and rising leaders in the field, it examines, evaluates, establishes, and reinforces Black women's commitment to social justice in education at all levels. Authors offer resource guides, personal reflections, bibliographies, and best practices for broad use and reference in communities, schools, universities, and nonprofit organizations. Collectively, their work promises to further enrich social justice education (SJE)—a critical pedagogy that combines intersectionality and human rights perspectives—and to deepen our understanding of the impact of SJE innovations on the humanities, social sciences, higher education, school development, and the broader professional world. This volume expands discussions of academic institutions and the communities they were built to serve.

A resource guide that uses African American memoir to address a variety of issues related to mentoring and curriculum development. In this resource guide for fostering youth empowerment, Stephanie Y. Evans offers creative commentary on two hundred autobiographies that contain African American travel memoirs of places around the world. The narratives are by such well-known figures as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Billie Holiday, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Muhammad Ali, Richard Pryor, Angela Davis, Condoleezza Rice, and President Barack Obama, as well as by many lesser-known travelers. The book addresses a variety of issues related to mentoring and curriculum development. It serves as a tool for “literary mentoring,” where students of all ages can gain knowledge and wisdom from texts in the same way achieved by one-on-one mentoring, and it also provides ideas for incorporating these memoirs into lessons on history, geography, vocabulary, and writing. Focusing on four main mentoring themes—life, school, work, and cultural exchange—Evans encourages readers to comb the texts for models of how to manage attitudes, behaviors, and choices in order to be successful in transnational settings. “This book provides a new and refreshing way to think about Black youth and issues of empowerment. It will be a useful tool for teachers, parents, scholars, and community organizers, leaders, and activists.” — Valerie Grim, Indiana University Bloomington

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.

A landmark collection documenting the social, political, and artistic lives of African American women throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century. Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2017. The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind: an extraordinary range of voices offering the expressions of African American women in print before, during, and after the Civil War. Edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this collection comprises work from forty-nine writers arranged into sections of memoir, poetry, and essays on feminism, education, and the legacy of African American women writers. Many of these pieces engage with social movements like abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, and civil rights, but the thematic center is the intellect and personal ambition of African American women. The diverse selection includes well-known writers like Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as lesser-known writers like Ella Sheppard, who offers a firsthand account of life in the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. Taken together, these incredible works insist that the writing of African American women writers be read, remembered, and addressed. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.