Browse Exhibits (5 total)
Betty Glenn Thomas did not consider herself to be a political figure, despite serving as the first Black teacher in the Oberlin Public Schools in a town that has boasted racial progressiveness since its founding in 1833. The controversy surrounding her hire extended past the initial decision; community members charged the Oberlin School Board with racial discrimination for placing Thomas at Centennial School where she would only teach Black students, and her tenure was up for debate even though the general protocol was that teachers got automatic tenure after three years. The town of Oberlin and historians exploring her legacy today have politicized Thomas’ very existence, which in some ways makes sense given her significant role in the schools and her life-long commitment to civic engagement. Thomas was important and political, but she also had reasons to not explicitly label herself as such.
Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper is an academeic with a long standing research interest in Langston Hughes. She graduated from Oberlin College in 1975. While she was a student Oberlin College, Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper was very involved in the Black Arts Movement. Later, while working at the College, Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper helped advocate for the future Africana Studies Department.
Born into slavery in 1837, Fanny Jackson Coppin would graduate from Oberlin College in 1865, the third black woman to do so, and would serve as an African American Advocate and Educator. This serves as an analysis of both the poetry Coppin wrote during the Civil War and of Coppin's legacy in the movement for the rights of African Americans.
Frances Walker-Slocum graduated from Oberlin Conservatory in 1945 with a degree in pianoforte. She went on to have a successful performance career. She returned to Oberlin Conservatory to teach in 1976 and gained tenure in 1979. She was the first tenured Black women professor in the history of Oberlin College and Conservatory.
Ruth Anna Fisher graduated from Oberlin College in 1906 with a degree in English and Latin at the age of 19. Beginning in education, as many women of means did during the turn of the century, she went on to engage in a career as a historian working for the Carnegie Institution and, eventually, the National Archives. This exhibit is analysis of Ruth Anna as not only a historian but as a woman of color conquering intellectual spaces that were not her own.