Promise and Possibility: Black Women and Public History

Black women’s relationship to the discipline of history, both as researchers and subjects of inquiry, is fraught. Yet, Black women have made considerable strides to create and nurture spaces for Black women’s history and legitimize it as a field, doing this work within the Ivory Tower and as public historians outside of it.This paper explores Black women’s efforts in the latter context, efforts which are largely undocumented due not only to the marginalization of public history within the discipline, but also because of the conditions under which public historians labor. The process of excavating Black women’s contributions to the field of public history is an act of recovery that results in a radical revision of the historical and historiographical record, especially as their work in museums, archives, historic sites, online and with/in communities is often not considered scholarly or worthy of analysis. Despite this, Black women public historians persist and, in so doing, offer compelling examples of the promise and possibility of public history. In a modest attempt to give credit where credit is due, this paper offers an accounting of the impact of Black women public historian’s intellectual labor on the field.