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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7972-5498
AccessType
Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
History
Year Degree Awarded
2022
Month Degree Awarded
September
First Advisor
Traci Parker
Second Advisor
Barbara Krauthamer
Third Advisor
James Smethurst
Fourth Advisor
Martha Biondi
Subject Categories
Social History
Abstract
This dissertation examines the role of Black women scholar-educators in spaces of higher education between 1957 and 2016. The lived experiences of Judyie Al-Bilali, Cheryl L. Evans, Joyce Ann Joyce, and Esther M.A. Terry are presented as case studies. Research methods also include oral history interviews and archival records from colleges and university repositories. This dissertation recovers Black women’s education and activism in higher education and situates Black women scholar-educators as historical actors within the long civil rights movement. As women who obtained advanced degrees within the decades of 1950 and 1970, the undergraduate and graduate experiences of Al-Bilali, Evans, Joyce, and Terry illustrate how the social context of Civil Rights and Black Power shaped Black women’s educational attainment and entry into the academy. This dissertation also argues that Black women scholar-educators utilized teaching, organizational leadership, and service work to reform the landscape of higher education throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From 1957 to the present day, Al-Bilali, Evans, Joyce, and Terry created academic and co-curricular initiatives that cultivated racial equity, fostered social integration, and advanced Black studies in higher education institutions.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/30242549
Recommended Citation
Frederick, Brittany M., ""The Capstone of My Education": Black Women, Student Power, and the Freedom Struggle in Higher Education" (2022). Doctoral Dissertations. 2618.
https://doi.org/10.7275/30242549
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2618
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.