victimized by our gender…we have never ceased to be in this struggle. And I think when Ella Baker used these words, of course she thought about all her people, but I believe she had a particular thought about Black women, when she said, ‘we, who believe in freedom, cannot rest,’ until it comes.” “Johnnetta… takes the study of Black history and culture to new heights. She has strengthened American education, advanced American scholarship, and enriched the lives of students of all ages and the future of our nation,” said President Biden. “[W]e’ve still got a lot of work to do,” Cole remarked of social activism. “Retirement is not in my vocabulary.”
the first woman to serve as president of Lincoln University of Pennsylvania in 1986. The following year, Cole became the first Black woman to serve as president of Atlanta’s Spelman College, one of only two surviving Black women's colleges in the nation, where she secured one of the largest financial gifts in HBCU history for several decades to come. She later assumed the role of Presidential Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Women’s Studies, and African American Studies at Emory
University before becoming president of Greensboro’s Bennett College, the second women’s HBCU, in 2002. In 2009, she became director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. “To bring the experience of art into one’s life,” she said of her museum headship, “is to become entangled in, maybe to fall in love with, human creativity.” Referring to March as “Herstory Month,” Cole, in a flared black suit declared, “We as Black women, as Francis Beal said many years ago, we carry a ‘double jeopardy,’ victimized by our race,
Crystal A. deGregory, Ph.D. is a graduate of Fisk, Tennessee State and Vanderbilt universities. She currently serves as a research fellow at Middle Tennessee State University’s Center for Historic Preservation and is the founder of two digital storytelling projects HBCUstory as well as Dorian and Beyond, the story of Hurricane Dorian in The Bahamas.
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