CCWH Prelinger Award Winner

BARBARA RANSBY (2004)

The Coordinating Council for Women in History is pleased to announce that Barbara Ransby has been awarded the seventh annual CCWH-Prelinger Scholarship Award of $20,000. Author of the award-winning biography, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, (University of North Carolina Press, 2003) Ransby is an associate professor in the Departments of African American Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ransby, who completed her doctorate at the University of Michigan in 1996, will use the Prelinger funds to explore the life and work of African American feminists in three organizations, the National Black Feminist Organization, its offshoot, The Comhabee River Collective, and the Third World Women’s Alliance.

The award committee was intrigued by her goal to provide a scholarly study of the three most prominent and active groups of black women in the 1970s. While more than a dozen studies have been published in the last decade highlighting the work of women in the civil rights movement, few of them have explored the feminist dimension of that struggle. To offer a comparative approach to her work, she will look at how black women organized in ways that resembled and differed from their white sisters. To accomplish her goals, Ransby will interview more than two dozen women who participated in these organizations and explore the ways in which these black women have set a balance in their struggles against sexism and racism. To assist in her research, Ransby will enlist the aid of a core of graduate students and scholars. “I want this to be a collective research project where younger scholars will learn about history and social change,” Ransby pointed out.

The committee was also impressed by Dr. Ransby’s unconventional career path. She overcame personal and economic obstacles that delayed her undergraduate education for five years. As she stated her experience, “I grew up in a home where the university was a foreign country… (while) ideas were taken seriously and books were treasured.” Then graduating from Columbia with honors, she won the Herman Ausubel Award for a history project on social change movements in Trinidad and Tobago. With a Mellon Fellowship and a three month old son, she began graduate studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1984.

Described by distinguished historian Linda Kerber as “quite untraditional and brilliantly creative,” Ransby’s dedication to public history, to narrowing the gap between the community and the university, is impressive. While at the University of Michigan, she co-founded the Ella Baker—Nelson Mandela Center which hosted scholars in community settings to talk about research on race and gender. In Chicago she initiated the Ida B. Wells CommUniversity based on the Baker—Mandela model. She also organized forums on the Chicago’s south side, bringing together scholars and citizens to discuss their work in a community setting. After receiving tenure at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she took a leave of absence to serve as the executive director of The Public Square, a non-profit organization. The mission of this organization is to create a more robust civil society by fostering dialogue and information sharing across lines of race, class, and gender difference.

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The Coordinating Council for Women in History, an organization for women in the historical profession, is committee to exploring the diverse experiences and histories of all women. Its primary goals are to educate men and women on the status of women in the historical profession and to promote research and interpretation in the areas of women’s history.

Information about the Prelinger Prize and other CCWH awards is available here.