Life of Ruth Anna Fisher
This newspaper clipping from the Washington Post resides in the Oberlin College Archives and contains Ruth Anna Fisher’s obituary. The document chronicles Fisher’s life from her birth in Lorain, Ohio on March 15, 1886, until her death in Washington DC on January 28, 1975. Fisher grew up in a relatively distinguished household in Lorian and followed in her father’s footsteps by attending Oberlin College for her higher education.[i] After graduating from Oberlin in 1906, Fisher was invited to accept a position at the Tuskegee Institute which was short lived due to a falling out with Booker T. Washington in regards to disagreements over the pedagogy of the school. Fisher subsequently took on various teaching jobs in her hometown of Lorain and at an industrial school for African American youth in Manassas, Virginia. She briefly lived in New York City where she managed the recreational center at the city’s YWCA. After gaining a sponsorship to study at the London School of Economics, Ruth Anna Fisher moved to England in 1920 to continue her education.
After completing her degree at the London School of Economics, Fisher gained the mentorship of Dr. John Franklin Jameson and began to work at the British Museum as a manuscript investigator for the Library of Congress Director of Processing. She worked under the Rockefeller Grant on an assignment titled “Project A” which examined American history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, specifically in relation to the materials available in various British archives. After her London apartment was bombed in 1940 during the World War II German Blitzkrieg, Fisher briefly returned to Washington DC only to venture back to England to continue her work after the war. She retired in 1957 and moved back to Washington DC. Between 1927 and 1952, Fisher photostated and microfilmed around 100,000 manuscripts per year which were returned to the United States.
This obituary provides a detailed account of Fisher’s life, albeit it does not outwardly celebrate her accomplishments as obituaries of other notable intellectuals often do. For example, the obituary of Fisher’s contemporary and friend, W. E. B. Du Bois, who passed away in August 1963, not only lists his accomplishments but commends him for his outspokenness, his race work, and his intellectual achievements. His written works are explicitly cited, and quotes by his contemporaries praise him for his character, intellectual labor, and activism.[ii] Meanwhile, Fisher’s obituary does little more than state the facts of her life and work, fails to cite her publications, and makes no mention of the significant strides that she made in organizing and publicizing black history through her archival work and writings.
These facts are impressive on their own, however, Fisher deserves a tribute that honors her for all of her magnificent work with the Library of Congress and beyond. As the first woman to gain a key to the British Museum, let alone woman of color, Fisher deserves not only a casual obituary mention but a major recognition of her achievements as an academic. Fisher was an intellectual in her own right, helping to organize and microfilm hundreds of thousands of documents annually, in addition to thoroughly analyzing and writing about these sources for publications such as the Negro History Bulletin, working alongside her friend and colleague DuBois to develop ideas about Pan-Africanism, and providing novel ideas about the place of African Americans in the broader view of American history, which had (and continues to) largely ignore their contributions, advancements, and even, at times, their existence.
In analyzing Fisher’s life and work, it is notable to distinguish Fisher as an expatriate and to note that she was successful less so in her home country of the United States but rather that the bulk of her work and recognition came after leaving the country to study and work in England. Fisher characterizes her experiences with racism in the United States in a letter to her friend Du Bois wherein she likens Washington DC to a pseudo-fascist state and apprehends its rampant racism, stating that:
“I hate Washington with an intense hatred.... I see no difference between the Japanese and Prussian military caste and the Southern oligarchy here. They are all convinced of their race superiority, and they control the army and navy. The Klu Klux Klan [sic] is like the Storm Troopers. And all of these groups want to make their opinions the predominant and powerful ones in their respective countries and the world with all else subservient to them. It further seems as likely for a Hitler to arise here in these circumstances [sic] as in Germany.”[iii]
Of course, racism and sexism were rampant in England as well as America during this period, but one must question whether the opportunities that Fisher was able to seek out in London were somehow more accessible to her than if she had remained in the States, even if she was being employed to work for the American Library of Congress. This is evident in the James Franklin Jameson letter to Waldo G. Leland which is also available in this online exhibit which recommends Fisher to work for the Library of Congress on Project A. In this letter, the racism of mid-twentieth century England is displayed by Jameson’s reluctance to disclose Fisher’s race despite her proven talents at archival work.
Even outside of the United States, Fisher’s race provided many obstacles to her successes in the archival world and in the academy of historical thought, and yet, despite these barriers, she was able to persevere and flourish. Fisher was an extraordinarily hardworking and skilled archivist and her historical writings deserve to be approached with seriousness due to their important and often revolutionary ideas. Due largely to her identity as a black woman, Fisher is an overlooked voice in twentieth century historical thought, and her work concerning Pan-Africanism and her adamant requests for fellow historians to recognize the barriers, struggles, and accomplishments of black people in the traditional narrative of history warrants significant recognition that up until this point has largely been denied and overlooked.
[i] J. H. Beers. Commemorative Biographical Record of the Counties of Huron and Lorain, Ohio: Containing Biographical Sketches of Prominent and Representative Citizens, and of Many of the Early Settled Families. 1894. p. 1158
[ii] Obituary of W. E. B. Du Bois, The New York Times, August 28, 1963. http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/11/05/specials/dubois-obit.html
[iii] Ruth Anna Fisher, 1886-. Letter from Ruth Anna Fisher to W. E. B. Du Bois, March 17, 1943. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b100-i092.