Community spotlight on African-American women and men becomes model of historic achievements
“Uncrowned Community Builders,” the brainchild of two UB staff members, bridges African-American communities with previously untold histories and accomplishments
The Uncrowned Queens Institute for Research and Education has spent the past decade building a national and regional history project to preserve the accomplishments and life stories of African-American women. It recently expanded its mission to include African-American men in a project called “Uncrowned Kings,” highlight the accomplishments of teenage African-Americans in a project called “Uncrowned Queens and Kings in the Wings,” and formed an umbrella project for all three groups called Uncrowned Community Builders.
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Through four publications, a Web presence and an upcoming radio program, the pair has collected and documented the lives and accomplishments of over eight hundred notable but largely unheralded African-American women and men in Western New York and throughout the country. Moreover, the project has established a model for the development of oral history projects that is now nationally recognized as a method for describing the cultural, economic, and social histories of entire regions.
The Uncrowned Queens Institute is directed by Peggy Brooks-Bertram, DrPH, Ph.D., and Barbara Nevergold, Ph.D. Before Uncrowned Queens became a full time endeavor, Brooks-Bertram was a research associate in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, UB School of Public Health and Health Professions, and the Department of African American Studies, College of Arts and Sciences; and Nevergold was coordinator of student personnel services at UB’s Educational Opportunity Center.
They originally set out to document the community-building work of African-American Women in connection with Buffalo’s centennial celebration of the 1901 Pan American Exposition.
As soon as it began, the project excited community interest and involvement. In short order, it grew beyond its Web site www.buffalo.edu/uncrownedqueens into four print volumes, each including one hundred biographies.
Niagara Movement
The third volume, published in 2005, celebrated the centennial of the Niagara Movement, a major step on the road to black militancy that had its roots in Western New York.
The two original research papers included in Uncrowned Queens: African American Women Community Builders, Volume III take the project more deeply into the academic realm.
One paper, by Brooks-Bertram, is about historian Drusilla Dunjee Houston, a syndicated columnist and author of the 1917 poem “America’s Uncrowned Queens,” from which the institute and the book take their names. Brooks-Bertram is working on a biography of Houston to be published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
The second research paper, by Nevergold, investigates Buffalo’s intriguing connection to the revolutionary Niagara Movement.
“This volume also represents our first bi-national effort, as it celebrates African-American women in Canadian border communities and their contributions to the preservation of African-Canadian history and culture,” says Brooks-Bertram.
The women in Volume III are community leaders, culture workers, civil rights activists, health-care providers, political figures, social workers, and church leaders active from 1905 to 2005. The list of their accomplishments is astonishing, all the more so for being virtually unknown until now.
“In locating the women in these four volumes and establishing their achievements, we learned many tricks and found information in many places,” says Brooks-Bertram.
“We searched what church records were available; college, university, and community archives; took oral histories; perused commemorative publications, personal letters, and recollections; reviewed organizational membership information, newsletters, and whatever else we could find,” Brooks-Bertram says.
“For instance, in old Buffalo newspapers like the turn-of-the-century Buffalo Courier, we learned about black women who by the late 1800s were publicly protesting school segregation,” Brooks-Bertram says.
“This volume concentrates on many of our contemporaries—and we’re still collecting. We are in a race against time because there remain many women in their 80s and 90s with incredible stories to tell,” Brooks-Bertram says.
Beyond Buffalo
The “Uncrowned Queens” project produced a model for historical documentation that has garnered interest in many other places beyond Buffalo, including Oklahoma.
As an official project of the Oklahoma Centennial Commission and officially launched in 2006, the Uncrowned Queens of Oklahoma collaborated with a broad base of community, civic, and municipal organizations, as well as individuals, throughout the 2007 Centennial Year. It hosted programs in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Enid, Altus, Chickasha, Shawnee, and Ardmore.
"Uncrowned Queens: African American Community Builders of Oklahoma 1907-2007" was published in conjunction with the commemoration of the state's Centennial Celebration. The fourth volume celebrated more than one hundred Oklahoma women, who represented more than half of the seventy-two counties in the state.
“The model we’ve developed encourages researchers to do what so many projects involving women have not done, which is to work from the bottom up,” Brooks-Bertram says.
“If we want to understand the history of women, we can’t tell the stories of heroines alone,” Brooks-Bertram says. “We need to hear the stories of all kinds of women involved in many endeavors at all points on the social and economic spectrum. If enough of these stories are gathered together, they can describe the history of an entire region.”
Additionally, research of the Oklahoma Uncrowned Queens uncovered a previously unknown link with the Uncrowned Kings project. Brooks-Bertram and Nevergold found a connection between a community builder in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who relocated to Buffalo after he was forced to flee the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. “Although we wrote about him in our Oklahoma Uncrowned Queens book, we plan additional documentation on the life of Andrew J. Smitherman, because of the significant bridge he provides between these two communities,” Nevergold says.
Brooks-Bertram and Nevergold have partnered with Buffalo public station WNED-AM to produce a radio series based on the oral histories of African-American women in Western New York that will air in late 2008. Interest has been expressed by public radio stations around the country in launching similar projects in their own regions.
Brooks-Bertram says, “If the larger public radio project goes forward, we will collect those oral histories from all over America into a national archive of women’s stories that will be held here in the UB archives and made available to researchers.”
“My colleague and I feel a deep sense of honor and responsibility in being entrusted with these cultural and historical assets,” adds Nevergold.
