Panelists

Deborah Gray White photo

Deborah Gray White

Friday, May 2008:35 - 10:20 AM

Session 1

Who Is Black America?

Deborah Gray White is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is the author of Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994, several K-12 text books on United States History, and Let My People Go, African Americans 1804-1860 (1999). In 2008, she published an edited work entitled Telling Histories: Black Women in the Ivory Tower, a collection of personal narratives written by African American women historians that chronicle the entry of black women into the historical profession and the development of the field of black women’s history. Freedom On My Mind: A History of African Americans, a co-authored text, is her most recent publication. As a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C, and as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, White conducted research on her in-press manuscript, “Lost in the USA: Marching for Identity at the Turn of the Millennium.” She was recently awarded the Carter G. Woodson Medallion for excellence in African American history, and also received an Honorary Doctorate from her undergraduate alma mater, Binghamton University..

AFFILIATION: Rutgers University, New Brunswick