Dover Resident Dorothy Vowels Recounts Family Experiences with Education in Segregated Virginia

Dorothy Vowels.

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Wade Foster of Warrenton, Va., was only concerned with his children’s safety when he requested a bus to transport his children to their school, miles from their home along a busy highway, in the early 1940s. But the school district ignored his request, despite the fact that the children of neighboring white families did have a bus. That prompted Foster to take decisive action against the injustice.

            Foster’s story, as recounted by one of his children, Dorothy Vowels, is the subject of a living-history conversation taking place on Oct. 22, at 5 p.m. in Hynson Lounge, Hodson Hall, on the Washington College campus, 300 Washington Ave.

            In “The Myth of Separate But Equal: Education in the Segregated South,” Vowels will discuss what happened to her father as a consequence of defending his children. The talk presents a glimpse into the struggle for equality as it happened family-by-family and skirmish-by-skirmish, finally culminating in the landmark 1954 Brown v Board of Ed. case.

            Dorothy Vowels currently lives in Dover, Del., where she is involved with the Bayhealth Medical Center and the Presbyterian Church of Dover. She has previously served as a representative to the Presbyterian General Assembly, as well as several terms on the Speer Trust, a Presbyterian Foundation that awards grants to organizations in Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland that are working to improve their communities. Prior to her retirement, she worked with Kent General Hospital in Dover and served several years on the Bayhealth Foundation Board.

            She and her late husband, Milton Russell Vowels, lived the life of an Air Force family. They raised two children, Karen Earle and Susan Vowels, both of whom now have careers in education. Susan, who is an associate professor in the Business Management Department at Washington College, will be on stage with her mother for the Oct. 22 conversation.  

            The event, which is free and open to the public, is presented by the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Black Studies Program.

New Book by Professor Alisha Knight Examines Work of Writer, Activist Pauline E. Hopkins

CHESTERTOWN, MD—A new book by Alisha Knight, associate professor of English and American Studies at Washington College, offers the first full-length critical analysis of pioneering African American writer Pauline Hopkins. Just released by the University of Tennessee Press, Knight’s Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream: An African American Writer’s (Re)Visionary Gospel of Success will provide literary scholars and historians alike with insight into the life and writings of a woman who openly confronted discrimination at the turn of the century.

“Pauline Hopkins broke the mold of the domestic tradition of nineteenth-century women’s writing, choosing instead to use self-made African American men and women to critique the racism and sexism that prevailed in American society,” says Knight.

A prolific writer, Hopkins published four novels, seven short stories, and numerous articles for the Colored American Magazine, where she also worked as an editor, in just the four-year period between 1900 and 1904. The Maine native lost her position at the magazine because of her habit of challenging authority figures with her then-revolutionary ideas about how literature should be used to advocate racial and gender equality in a Post-Civil War America. Her “Famous Men” and “Famous Women” series for the Colored American Magazine offered African American models of success, but her fiction often depicted African American heroes who either failed to achieve success at home because of societal barriers, or found success only after leaving the United States.

“I've always been interested in authors who have been underrepresented in the canon and in the classroom,” Knight explains, “and being able to study Pauline Hopkins at length has been fulfilling. I’m pleased that Hopkins has been gaining attention, and I hope my book helps make her work more accessible to students and everyday readers. Hopkins wanted her writing to reach a broad audience, and she worked hard to produce material that was both straightforward and intellectually engaging. I would like to think that my book does likewise.”

Dr. Knight is a summa cum laude graduate of Spelman College who went on to earn a master’s from Rutgers and both a master’s and doctorate from Drew University. In addition to teaching at Washington College, she directs the Black Studies Program, which encourages a greater understanding of black culture and a new appreciation for the impact people of African descent have made on world cultures and human history.

Among Dr. Knight’s published articles are “Furnace Blasts for the Tuskegee Wizard: Revisiting Pauline E. Hopkins, Booker T. Washington, and the Colored American Magazine” (American Periodicals) and “One and One Make One: A Metacritical and Psychoanalytic Reading of Friendship in Toni Morrison's Sula” (College Language Association Journal). Recipient of a prestigious Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation in 2007, she is currently working on a study of late 19th and early 20th century African American book publishing practices.

Son of "The Immortal Henrietta Lacks" To Speak Feb. 21 at Washington College

CHESTERTOWN, MD—David “Sonny” Lacks, whose mother is the subject of Rebecca Skloot’s best-selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, will visit Washington College Tuesday, February 21 to talk about his family’s reaction to learning that their late mother’s cells were being sold in the billions for use in laboratories around the world. The event, a moderated discussion with the audience, will take place at 5 p.m. in Decker Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts, with a reception to follow in the Underwood Lobby.

Sponsored by the College’s Office of Multicultural Affairs, William James Forum, Black Studies Program, and Department of Philosophy, the event is free and open to the public.

Henrietta Lacks was a poor African-American tobacco farmer and mother of five whose cells, harvested without her knowledge in 1951, the year she died of cervical cancer, became the first immortal human cells to be grown in a laboratory. Nicknamed HeLa cells, they became an important tool for modern medicine and remain the most widely used cell line in the world today.

Sonny Lacks and his siblings first learned of the cells in the 1970s when researchers wanted to conduct tests on them to learn more about the HeLa line. It has been a point of controversy that, although biotech companies have profited from sales of the HeLa cells, the family has never been financially compensated.

The story was catapulted into the national conscience when author Skloot published her book in 2010. In lectures to university and library audiences throughout the country, Sonny Lacks now celebrates his mother’s legacy and offers a personal perspective on the collision of medicine, race, ethics and business represented by her story.

Vanderbilt Professor and Author to Explore Racial "Passing" in America Thursday, February 2

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CHESTERTOWN, MD— One of the most persistent of the myths that Americans tell themselves about race is that the line between black and white is a matter of genetics rather than choice. But new scholarship is chipping away at this assumption, revealing how men and women, and sometimes entire families, have consciously stepped across the color line.

In a February 2 presentation at Washington College, law professor and historian Daniel Sharfstein will delve into the dramatic stories of three black families who responded to times of great racial upheaval by seizing opportunities to reinvent themselves as white. Among the author’s astonishing discoveries is an antebellum Southern family that – after covertly crossing the line from black to white – became wealthy sugar planters, slaveholders, and ardent Confederates.

Sponsored by the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, Sharfstein’s talk, “The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America,” is free and open to the public, and will begin at 5:00 pm in the college’s Hynson Lounge, Hodson Hall. A book signing will follow the presentation. The talk is co-sponsored by the Black Studies Program, the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture.

Sharfstein’s recent book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin, 2011), has been lauded far and wide as a masterpiece, a work that, in the words of writer Melissa Fay Greene, “overthrows nearly everything Americans thought they knew about race.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed called The Invisible Line “a must read for all who are interested in the construction of race in the United States,” and the Boston Globe praised its “you-are-there” approach to history as “spellbinding.” The New York Times lauded Sharfstein’s “astonishingly detailed rendering of the variety and complexity of racial experience.’’

Sharfstein is an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, he has held fellowships from Harvard University, New York University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the New York Times, The Economist, the Washington Post, and other publications.

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Founded in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, Washington College is a private, independent college of liberal arts and sciences located in colonial Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience is dedicated to fostering innovative approaches to the American past and present. Through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach, and a special focus on written history, the Starr Center seeks to bridge the divide between the academic world and the public at large. For more information on the Center, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

Crossing Racial Lines in Kent County: Nov. 15 Programs Explore Local – and Personal – History

CHESTERTOWN, MD— Less than half a century after legal desegregation came to Kent County, many stories of the community’s long and complex racial history are only beginning to be told. But two special public programs on November 15 will present firsthand accounts of extraordinary family and personal sagas stretching back 200 years. Writer Dionne Ford will explore the history of her own family in “From Slaves to Senators: A Kent County Family in Black and White,” at 4:30 pm at Washington College; a roundtable discussion at the Heron Point retirement community, “Growing Up in the 1960s in Chestertown,” will follow at 8 pm.

Ford’s talk, hosted by the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College and co-sponsored by the Black Studies Program and Office of Multicultural Affairs, will be held in Litrenta Lecture Hall, John S. Toll Science Center. The evening roundtable will take place in Heron Point’s Wesley Hall, 501 Campus Ave., Chestertown. Both events are free and open to the public.

Ford’s journey into her Eastern Shore family’s interracial roots began at the age of 12 with a simple question: “Grandpa, are you white?” His answer sent her on a lifelong quest to piece together the stories of the masters and slaves, Confederates and senators, preachers and entertainers whose lives eventually led to her own. Ford's great-great-grandfather, William R. Stuart, was a white Eastern Shore native and Confederate soldier who had several children with one of his African-American slaves, Tempy Burton. (Stuart’s father, also named William R. Stuart, was an early alumnus of Washington College.)

Ford blogs about her search for her ancestors at http://dionneford.com, often interweaving stories of her great-great-grandparents with those of her interracial immediate family. Her reflections on racial identity and self-determination have also appeared in the New York Times, the NAACP’s blog, and Brain, Child magazine. A former TV reporter, Ford has received several fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and is currently at work on a novel about a black expatriate in Brazil. Her November 15 talk will focus on the process of delving into what she calls “a not uncommon but often untold part of American history,” and its implications for her family.

The evening program, featuring Chestertown natives Armond Fletcher, Milford Murray, and Ellsworth Tolliver, will focus on a later period of Kent County history, but will explore some of the same themes: where and why American society draws racial lines, how these lines shift over time, and how we might transcend them today. Each of these three speakers experienced racial segregation firsthand and was an active participant in the struggle to integrate Kent County schools and instigate civil rights reform on a local level.

In sharing their stories, they hope to contribute to a larger understanding of the legacy of segregation on the Eastern Shore, and encourage dialogue across racial lines. “Both of these programs deal with different aspects of a topic that shapes all of our lives, and we hope that many people will be able to continue the conversation from one event to the other,” says Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of the Starr Center.

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Founded in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, Washington College is a private, independent college of liberal arts and sciences located in colonial Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience is dedicated to fostering innovative approaches to the American past and present. Through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach, and a special focus on written history, the Starr Center seeks to bridge the divide between the academic world and the public at large. For more information on the Center, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

Photograph: Dionne Ford poses with her daughters at the entrance to Washington College, where her great-great-great-grandfather was a student.

Influential Historian of Slavery to Explore Little-Known Winslow Homer Painting

CHESTERTOWN— In Winslow Homer’s 1866 painting, Near Andersonville, a group of tired, dusty men in blue are marched down a country road toward the infamous Confederate prisoner of war camp at Andersonville, Georgia. In the foreground, an enslaved woman stands at the door of her cabin, watching and waiting.

On Thursday, April 28, in an illustrated talk at Washington College, distinguished historian Peter H. Wood will use this image – one of Homer’s most striking, yet least-known works – to discuss the tumultuous final two years of the American Civil War. Sponsored by the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, and co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History and the Black Studies Program, “Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War” is free and open to the public. A book signing will follow the talk, which will begin at 5 p.m. in Litrenta Lecture Hall, John S. Toll Science Center, on the Washington College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

Wood, one of this generation’s most influential historians of the African American experience, will be in residence at Washington College April 23-30 as the Starr Center’s 2011 Frederick Douglass Visiting Fellow. An emeritus Professor of History at Duke University, he is the author/editor of six books, including Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1974, Black Majority remains a landmark book, credited with setting the stage for a new generation of scholarship on American slavery.

More recently, Wood has turned his attention to visual representations of African Americans in the artwork of Winslow Homer, authoring three books on the subject. The third installment in this trilogy, Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War, was released by Harvard University Press in 2010. Acclaimed Civil War historian James M. McPherson called the book “powerful and compelling,” and Harvard University’s John Stauffer raved, “part detective story, part history, and part art criticism, this book is a masterpiece.”

Unknown to art historians for nearly a century, Near Andersonville languished in a New Jersey attic for years before being donated to the Newark Museum in 1966. “This is undoubtedly one of Winslow Homer’s most complex images,” said Starr Center director Adam Goodheart. “In placing the Union troops and the enslaved woman side by side, it sheds new light on the ambiguities of 1864.”

A graduate of Baltimore’s Gilman School, Peter H. Wood earned his doctorate at Harvard University and has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University. His other books include Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America (2002), Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years (1989), and Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream (2004).

Established through a generous gift from Maurice Meslans and Margaret Holyfield of St. Louis, the annual Frederick Douglass Visiting Fellowship brings to campus an individual engaged in the study or interpretation of African-American history and related fields. Besides providing the recipient an opportunity for a week of focused writing, the fellowship also offers Washington College students exposure to some of today's leading interpreters of African-American culture. During his week in Chestertown, Wood will speak with students and faculty about his research on visual representations of African Americans, and his experience interpreting African American history to a broad public.

Founded in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, Washington College is a private, independent college of liberal arts and sciences located in colonial Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The college’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience is dedicated to fostering innovative approaches to the American past and present. Through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach, and a special focus on written history, the Starr Center seeks to bridge the divide between the academic world and the public at large. For more information on the Center, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

WC's Professor Knight Awarded Wilson Fellowship

One of only 20 nationwide to receive prestigious award

Chestertown, MD, March 7, 2007 — Washington College is pleased to announce that Dr. Alisha Knight, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies and Director of the Black Studies Program, has been awarded a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship.

The Wilson Fellowship, administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, assists junior faculty in their pursuit of scholarly research and writing in order to support their chances for success as tenured academics.

An interdisciplinary committee of noted scholars reviewed the credentials of applicants nationwide from a range of fields in the humanities, social sciences and physical sciences. Dr. Knight is one of only 20 to receive this prestigious award.

"Dr. Knight's fellowship is an honor for Washington College as well as for her," said Provost and Dean Christopher Ames. "She is pursuing an important and original line of research, and this fellowship will allow her to bring that significant work to fruition earlier."

Under the auspices of the fellowship program, Dr. Knight intends to further her research into a unique aspect in the development of African-American literary history: the role of 19th-century subscription publishing.

Subscription books geared toward African-American readers were sold door-to-door by traveling agents. On the one hand, subscription publishing arguably was an optimal method for disseminating books to a primarily rural African-American readership that had limited access to bookstores. On the other hand, by the 1870s subscription publishing was suffering from a diminished reputation.

Dr. Knight's project raises (and attempts to answer) important questions about why African-American authors would choose subscription publishing and thereby risk their literary reputations. Studying book-dissemination methods can shed light on the roles these authors assumed as agents for social change.

The Wilson Fellowship award period runs from June 2007 to June 2008. It includes a stipend, a travel or publication grant, and a fall retreat. During the grant period, Dr. Knight will be paired with a scholar in her academic field who will advise and mentor her.

"The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has supported intellectual leaders for over six decades," said Dr. Knight. "Not only am I honored and humbled to receive this award, but I also feel uplifted by this acknowledgement of my work and recognition of my potential."

Channeling Thelonious: 'Blue Monk' At Washington College, February 13

Chestertown, MD, January 31, 2007 — It will be an afternoon of jazz, poetry and drama as award-winning playwright Robert Earl Price reads excerpts from "Blue Monk," his play about jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, at Washington College's Casey Academic Center Forum on Tuesday, February 13, at 4:30 p.m.

Price's evocation of the immortal jazz giant known as the "Genius of Modern Music" will be accompanied, appropriately enough, by the Washington College Jazz Combo, under the direction of Ken Schweitzer.

Monk (1917-1982) recently received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize "for a body of distinguished and innovative musical composition that has had a significant and enduring impact on the evolution of jazz." While he has been dubbed "the High Priest of Bebop," Monk's unique style was considered too avant-garde even for many of his fellow cutting-edge bop musicians in the 1940s, not to mention the listening public at large. But by the late 1950s, tastes were catching up with Monk's complex, sophisticated musical phraseology, and his fame and fortunes were on the rise. By 1964 he was on the cover of Time magazine. Many of Monk's compositions—"Round Midnight," "52nd Street Theme," "Blue Monk" and others—are among the most oft-recorded standards in the jazz canon. In 1993 he was honored with a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

It's hard to imagine a more apt playwright to tap into the Monk mystique than Robert Earl Price, who has tackled similar subjects—the tragic jazz icon Charlie Parker, the legend-shrouded bluesman Robert Johnson—in some of his other theatrical productions. When "Blue Monk" was produced in Johannesburg, it was so well received that it ended up as one of five plays nominated for South Africa's National Theater Award. (Price's Charlie Parker opus, "Yardbird's Vamp," likewise enjoyed overseas success, playing to standing-room-only crowds for the duration of its Berlin run.)

Price, a graduate of the American Film Institute, was a protégé of the Oscar-winning director Jan Kadar and Pulitzer/Emmy winner Alex Haley. Price was the script consultant for the Peabody Award-winning production of "The Boy King" (the story of Dr. Martin Luther King's youth) and a principal writer on the CBS/Alex Haley series "Palmerstown, U.S.A." Price's many awards include the American Film Institute's William Wyler Award for screenwriting and a Cultural Olympics Commission for theater.

Currently playwright in residence at Atlanta's famed 7 Stages Theatre, Price also is a poet of some note, with four collections of verse—Bloodlines, Blood Elegy, Blues Blood and Wise Blood—published to date. His poems also have appeared in scores of journals and magazines. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for poetry, a Broadside Press Award, a Bronze Jubilee Award, and dozens of other poetry prizes and notices.

"Blue Monk" is being presented by the Washington College Drama Department, the Black Studies Program, and the Dean of the College. Norman James Theatre is in William Smith Hall. Admission is free and open to the public. For more information, call 410-778-7888.

Fall Semester 2006: New Black Studies Minor

Chestertown, MD, May 16, 2006 — Washington College will launch a new Black Studies minor starting the fall of 2006. The program will emphasize the interdisciplinary study of the multifaceted history, culture, and lives of people of African descent by drawing from courses in a number of departments, including but not limited to economics, education, English, foreign languages, history, and music.

Unlike African-American and African Studies programs, Washington College's Black Studies minor will not be limited to a single nation or continent, but will encompass all locales where black people have voluntarily or involuntarily been dispersed throughout history, according to Alisha Knight, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies and the Black Studies Program Director.

"The Black Studies minor offers students of all backgrounds the opportunity to explore and research various aspects of black culture from local, national, and global perspectives," said Knight. "Students who earn a minor in Black Studies will increase their understanding of our multicultural society and today's complex global realities. Ultimately Black Studies minors will be more equipped to contribute to diverse workforces."

The interdisciplinary minor consists of six courses (24 credits). Two humanities courses, three social sciences courses, and one additional course in any discipline are required. At least two of the six courses must pertain to black culture outside of the United States, and students are encouraged to take three of these courses.

Regularly offered courses that apply toward the Black Studies minor include Economic Development (BLS 218/ECN 218), The Contemporary Francophone World (BLS 312/FRS 312), The African American Novel (BLS 319/ENG 319), and History of South Africa (BLS 371/HIS 371). Students may request approval to apply a course not cross-listed with Black Studies toward the minor. Students planning to complete the Black Studies minor should notify the director of their intentions early in their academic careers and consult with the director when selecting courses for the minor.

For more information, interested students should contact Dr. Alisha Knight at aknight2@washcoll.edu. A student information and advising session will be scheduled for early September.