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This chapter explores Reddick’s pioneering work in the fledgling field of black history. During the 1930s, Reddick worked as a professor of history at Kentucky State College and Dillard University, and he took a leading role in the black fraternity Phi Beta Sigma. He also completed his PhD in history from the University of Chicago, where he studied under the Lost Cause scholar Avery O. Craven. While tracking Reddick’s activities across these institutions, special focus is on Reddick’s contributions to Carter Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Reddick gathered the testimonies of former slaves and influenced the larger effort by the Works Progress Administration, published a landmark historiographical article in the Journal of Negro History, completed an innovative dissertation on the role of white newspapers in New Orleans in sowing divisions and helping provoke the Civil War, and documented racial discrimination at libraries, archives, journals, and conferences.

The fifth chapter investigates Davis’s involvement in the culture-and-personality school in the latter half of the 1930s. In particular, it tracks the making and reception of Davis’s and John Dollard’s classic book Children of Bondage (1940). Davis began the study while a professor of anthropology at Dillard University in New Orleans. He allied with Yale sociologist John Dollard, who had devised a distinct culture-and-personality orientation under the guidance of linguist Edward Sapir. After Davis had gathered the research with Dollard, the two men spent the first several months of 1938 at Yale University’s Institute of Human Relations, where they drafted the book. Children of Bondage represented a landmark of interdisciplinary collaboration, and it was theoretically pioneering in combining the Davis’s caste-and-class framework with an analysis of socialization among black youths in Natchez and New Orleans. In addition to theoretical innovation, Children of Bondage also served as a compelling document that humanized the black youth that it described. The book’s commercial success and positive reception testified to the book’s achievements, though some reviewers misunderstood it as merely enumerating the damage among black youths.

This chapter discusses the close of Reddick’s career, particularly as he served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at Dillard University from 1978 to 1987. Although he commiserated with his good friend St. Clair Drake about the new conservative era and its hostility to further civil rights gains, he nevertheless remained active, including his participation in a landmark conference that grow into the important book The State of Afro-American History (1985), which included work by the next generation of pioneering black scholars like Darlene Clark Hine, Thomas C. Holt, James D. Anderson, and Robert L. Harris, Jr., even as it also included Reddick’s contemporaries such as his fellow Fisk student John Hope Franklin. The chapter closes by recounting Reddick’s death, explaining why he is not better known, and underlining the ongoing importance of his model of scholar-activist and its palpable importance today.

This chapter discusses new initiatives by Women of the Storm, including a bid to host one of the presidential debates in New Orleans. The chapter discusses this new undertaking, which was done in partnership with four universities in New Orleans: Dillard, Loyola, Tulane, and Xavier. The chapter traces the entire process from the submission of the application materials, to the site visits by the selection committee, to the final rejection of the bid to host the debate. Commentary by Anne Milling as well as local and national media sources is also provided. The chapter ends with an examination of Women of the Storm’s activities at each of the national party conventions leading up to the 2008 presidential elections.

Johnnie Hines Watts Prothro was one of the first African American women scientists and researchers in the field of food chemistry and nutrition. Having grown up in the segregated American South, Dr. Protho became particularly interested in promoting healthy nutrition and diets for African Americans. Johnnie Hines Watts was born on February 28, 1922, in Atlanta, Georgia, in the segregated South. Her parents emphasized the importance of an education and she graduated from high school at the age of fifteen. She enrolled in the historically black Spelman College in Atlanta as a commuter student and received a BS degree with honors in Home Economics from Spelman in 1941. Following her graduation, she obtained a position as a teacher of foods and nutrition—the usual career path for African American women who earned bachelor’s degrees in science during the Jim Crow era—at Atlanta’s all-black Booker T. Washington High School. Watts taught at Booker T. Washington High School from 1941 to 1945, then moved to New York City to attend Columbia University, from which she received her MS degree in 1946. Armed with her master’s degree, Watts became an instructor of chemistry at a historically black Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She worked there during the 1946–1947 academic year before deciding to pursue a PhD. Watts enrolled in the University of Chicago after researching the doctoral offerings of several universities. She was the recipient of a number of scholarships and awards at the University of Chicago. Among the awards were the Laverne Noyes Scholarship (1948–1950), the Evaporated Milk Association Award (1950–1951), the Borden Award from the American Home Economics Association (1950– 1951), and a research assistantship (1951–1952). Watts married Charles E. Prothro in 1949. It is said that they met in Connecticut, but this is not clearly documented. Watts Prothro received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1952. Her dissertation title is “The Relation of the Rates of Inactivation of Peroxidase, Catecholase, and Ascorbase to the Oxidation of Ascorbic Acid in Vegetables.”

Dr. Hopkins is one of the few American women to have held a doctorate in science and a license to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Her career included academia, industry, and government. Esther was born Esther Arvilla Harrison on September 16, 1926, in Stamford, Connecticut. She was the second of three children born to George Burgess Harrison and Esther Small Harrison. Her father was a chauffeur and sexton at a church, and her mother worked in domestic service. Neither of her parents had an advanced education. Her father had some high school education; her mother attended only primary school. However, both of her parents wanted to make sure their children had a good education. When Esther was three and a half years old, her mother took her along to register her older brother for school. Because Esther was taller than her brother, the teacher suggested that she take the test to start school. She passed the test and was able to start kindergarten at the age of three and a half! She and her brother went to school together all through elementary school. Boys and girls were separated in junior high school; in high school they remained separate but attended the same school. She decided in junior high school that she wanted to be a brain surgeon. This was because she met a woman doctor in Stamford who had an office in one of the buildings that her father cleaned. The woman was a physician and graduate of Boston University Medical School. Esther decided that she wanted to be just like her. Therefore, when Esther entered high school, she chose the college preparatory math and science track. She took as many science courses as possible in order to get into Boston University. She spent a lot of time at the local YWCA, becoming a volunteer youth leader. One speaker at a YWCA luncheon discouraged her from entering science and suggested that she become a hairdresser. Esther was hurt but not discouraged by this. She graduated from Stamford High School in 1943.