The Intercollegiate Department of Black Studies at The Claremont Colleges has announced this year’s Sojourner Truth Lecturer to be Dr. Darlene Clark Hine, noted author and pioneer of African-American women’s history. Dr. Hine’s lecture, “Black Professionals and Race Consciousness: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 1940-1945,” will take place on Thursday, February 20, at 7:30 p.m. in the Humanities Auditorium on the Scripps College campus. This lecture is free and open to the public; for additional program information or directions to the Auditorium, please contact Sonya Young, administrative coordinator, in the Intercollegiate Department of Black Studies at (909) 607-3070.
Dr. Darlene Clark Hine is the author and editor of several articles, anthologies, and books on African-American history including: A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America; More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas; Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History; as well as the two-volume encyclopedia, Black Women in America. For her efforts as a historian and educator, she has earned numerous awards and fellowships, such as the Carter G. Woodson Medallion from the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, the Zora Neale Hurston-Paul Robeson Award from the National Council for Black Studies, and fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and at the National Humanities Center. In 1990, her book Black Women in White was named Outstanding Book by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights.
According to Dr. Hine: “Historians can write a history of anything or anyone but the key is the historian must decide that thing, event, person or group is worthy of investigation and apparently no one had ever thought black women… were worth studying . . .And that was the beginning of my commitment to telling the truth, to lifting the veil, to shattering the silence about black women in American history.”
Currently, Dr. Hine is the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of History and director of the Comparative Black History Ph.D. Program at Michigan State University, and president of the Southern Historical Association. Hine earned her Ph.D from Kent State University.