Browse Exhibits (13 total)
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.
Shirley Graham Du Bois was a musician, composer, and playwright in the mid 20th century. She began attending Oberlin Conservatory at age 35, supporting two chilldren while she earned her Bachelor's and Master's degrees. She wrote and produced multiple operas about Black people's experiences. Later in her life, Graham Du Bois became more politically active; she joined (and later resigned) from the NAACP and she openly supported Communist party nominates for public office. At age 54, Shirley Graham Du Bois married WEB Du Bois and moves with him to Toronto, Canada, then after being deported, the couple eventually settled down in Accra, Ghana in 1961. After Du Bois died in 1963, Graham Du Bois moved to Eygpt to continue writing, and then died in China in 1977. If you wish to learn more about the life and legacy of Shirely Graham Du Bois, check out https://historydesignlab.org/sgd/intersections-recovering-the-genius-of-shirley-graham-du-bois/index.
Graduating from Oberlin in 1957, Sylvia Louise Hill Williams went on to have an illustrious career in Art History. Becoming Director of the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. in 1983, she helped move the Smithsonian towards a more culturally nuanced, scholarly, and intersectional perspective of African Artwork.