Uncrowned Queens

Since its inception in 1999, the Uncrowned Queens Institute has developed a multi-faceted model that promotes community engagement in the documentation/ preservation of the historical/cultural assets of African-American regional history.  Its signature website hosts a comprehensive historical archive accessible nationally and internationally.  The UQI model is unique and cutting-edge in the use of digital tools for the preservation of regional history and culture and for its focus on community builders, whose history has been ignored, overlooked, and largely undocumented.  Join founders Dr. Peggy Brooks-Bertram, CEL '08, PhD '02, and Dr. Barbara Nevergold, PhD '86, Ed.M '74, for this webinar retrospective of the organization’s growth and development and its accomplishments and contributions. 

About Peggy Brooks-Bertram & Barbara Nevergold
Dr. Bertram was born in Baltimore, Maryland and currently lives in Buffalo, New York.  She completed a doctorate in Public Health at The Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health and Hygiene and a second doctorate in American Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo where she completed a dissertation on Dunjee-Houston’s first book Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empires.  Peggy Brooks-Bertram is President and co-founder of the Uncrowned Queens Institute for Research and Education on Women, Inc, a premier online organization working to preserve the regional histories of African American women and men in Western New York and across the country. The Institute was co-founded with Dr, Barbara Seals Nevergold.  The website received the first International Webby Award for innovation and content.  The Institute was named after Drusilla Dunjee-Houston’s 1917 poem, America’s Uncrowned Queens, Dedicated to the Heroic, Toiling Black Woman. 

Dr. Nevergold is a graduate of the University at Buffalo and received master’s degrees in French Education and Counseling Education.  She earned a doctorate degree in Counseling Education.   In 1999, she co-founded the Uncrowned Queens Institute for Research and Education on Women, Inc., with Dr. Peggy Brooks-Bertram.  Through the Institute, they have created a model for the reclamation, collection, preservation, and dissemination of the biographic histories of African-American community builders. The Institute’s signature digital archive is found at www.uncrownedcommunitybuilders.com  

Dr. Nevergold is the co-author of the 4-volume series, Uncrowned Queens: African American Women Community Builders of Western New York and of Oklahoma and Go, Tell Michelle: African American Women Write to the New First Lady (SUNY Press, 2009).  She has also authored numerous publications, focused on Western New York history (including the African American experience at the 1901 Pan American Exposition; the Buffalo African American connection to the Niagara Movement, 1905, and the life of Andrew J. Smitherman, a survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921).  Her most recent publications are Ida Dora Fairbush- Buffalo’s First African American Teacher:  A Pioneer (2019) and “East Presbyterian:  The Forgotten Congregation”, Western New York Heritage Magazine, Vol. 3, Winter, 2022.  

Dr. Nevergold was inducted into The HistoryMakers in 2018 and her biographic interview is included in the organization’s Library of Congress archive. She is a fellow in the New York Academy of History.