The History of Black Women Graduate Students, 1921–1948

“Bound to Them By a Common Sorrow”: African American Women, Higher Education, and Collective Advancement

“…However, in reviewing the applications of several hundred black women applicants to the GEB and the JRF fellowship programs, it is particularly revealing that more than half of them had attended summer sessions at their own expense at Harvard; Teachers College, Columbia; University of Pennsylvania; Cornell; Michigan; Ohio State; Iowa; Minnesota; Wisconsin; Kansas; and the University of Chicago. 54 The funds were restricted to persons under the age of thirty-five and those who were perceived to have "leadership potential." The grants given to African American women by the GEB from 1923 to 1929 were specifically to study home economics, library science, and general education at Hampton Institute with the requirement that the grant recipient would return and work in the South.…”

Race, Gender, Philanthropy and the Politics of Knowledge

“…Over a twenty-year period, the Rosenwald Fund awarded 523 fellowships to black Americans; slightly more than a third (193) went to women. 35 Many stellar black women scholars with doctorates were available by the early 1940s. These included Merze Tate, the first black woman to graduate from Oxford who also held a PhD from Radcliffe in politics and international affairs; Adelaide Hill, a Smith College graduate with degrees from University of Pennsylvania and Radcliffe; Estella Scott and Bonita Valien, who both had doctorates in sociology, from the University of Pennsylvania and University of Wisconsin, respectively; Mamie Clark, who had a doctorate in psychology from Columbia University; and Mabel Murphy Smythe-Haith, with a PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin.…”

Lifting as We Climb: African American Women's Education Experience in the Ivory Tower

“…This research is significant for a number of reasons: 1) There is a paucity of contemporary qualitative studies that examine the African American female's experiences in the ivory tower, using her own voice (Benjamin, 1997;Collins, 2001;Gray-White, 2008;HintonJohnson, 2003;Liddell, 2006Mason, 2006Perkins, 2009;Schwartz, Bower, Rice & Washington, 2003;Wadpole, 2007;and 2) Memorializing the participants' experiences, using a narrative style, provides a way to capture, analyze, and interpret the complexity of the convergence of race and gender in academia. 3) Few qualitative studies specifically examine the impact reifying White hegemony has on the educational experiences of Black women.…”

“…Few qualitative studies have been conducted on the educational experiences of early Black female pioneers who had commenced their post secondary education in the beginning of the twentieth century (Evans 2007;Perkins, 2009). Jane McAllister, for example, who is often credited as being the first African American female to earn a Ph.D. in Education, wrote her dissertation on the teaching pedagogy of Black educators (Smith-Crocco & Waite, 2007).…”

“…They earned doctorates in various fields, including English philology, German, and Economics (Evans, 2007;Perkins, 2009)…”