Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
Encyclopedia
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall is a prominent historian and public intellectual who focuses on the history of slavery in the Caribbean, Latin America
, and Louisiana
(United States), and the African Diaspora
in the Americas. Discovering a cache of extensive European colonial records in Louisiana, she created a database of records of descriptions of over 100,000 enslaved Africans. It has become a prominent resource for historical and genealogical research of African Americans. In addition to earning recognition in academia, Hall has been featured in the New York Times, People Magazine, ABC News
, and other popular outlets for her contributions to scholarship, genealogy, and the critical reevaluation of the history of slavery.
Midlo Hall is an award-winning author and Professor Emerita of Latin American and Caribbean History, Rutgers University
, New Jersey
. She is also an International Advisory Board Member of the Harriet Tubman
Resource Institute for the Study of Global Migrations of African Peoples, York University
, Toronto, Canada. She now (2010) teaches Africans in the Atlantic world at Michigan State University
as Adjunct Professor of history.
Her work Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992) traced to original cultures the various ethnic African origins of enslaved Africans. She changed the way in which several related disciplines are researched and taught in the United States. She traced Africans to specific cultures of the continent, and added to scholarly understanding of the multicultural and diverse origins of American culture. She was able to demonstrate distinct patterns of settlement and re-Africanization of Louisiana, resulting in its unique culture in the American South.
, the daughter of Ethel and Herman Lazard Midlo, a civil rights and labor attorney. Her parents were of Russian- and Polish-Jewish ancestry. She was influenced by her father's activism. In 1990 her mother founded the Ethel and Herman Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans
, where her father had donated his papers and archives before his death in 1978.
Midlo has had a career marked by early political activism as well as academic scholarship. After World War II, at age 16 in 1945, Hall helped organize and participated in the New Orleans Youth Council, an interracial, direct-action community organization which encouraged and helped African-American voter registration and defied racial segregation
laws. In 1946 she was elected to the Executive Board of the Southern Negro Youth Congress
at the Southern Youth Legislature in Columbia, South Carolina
. It had operated since 1937 to end lynching
, racial discrimination and segregation, and to achieve voting rights for all.
Midlo helped organize Young Progressives, an interracial youth and student movement in segregated New Orleans that included students from Tulane University
, Newcomb College, and Loyola University
(white colleges) and from Dillard
and Xavier universities (historically black colleges.) She was active in the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace
, the Progressive Party
candidate. She organized in New Orleans, rural Louisiana, and in Atlanta, Georgia
. She also was active in the Civil Rights Congress
and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.
Starting at Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University
, Midlo studied history
. After years of political activism and marriage, Midlo Hall completed some of her academic studies outside the United States, which gave her broader insight as she acquired fluency in French and Spanish. She earned a B.A. in history at Mexico City College
, 1962; followed by her master's in Latin America
n History, also at Mexico City College in 1963-64.
While a doctoral graduate student at the University of Michigan
, Midlo Hall published an article advocating medical treatment for heroin addicts: "Mechanisms for Exploiting the Black Community", The Negro Digest
, November 1969. It inspired demonstrations in the streets of Detroit. She organized methadone
-maintenance treatment programs in both Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan
. Adoption of such treatment by major cities helped reduce heroin use and the crime rate in the inner city of Detroit and others. Midlo Hall earned a Ph.D. in Latin American History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1970.
over ideological differences. There Midlo Hall completed her B.A. and master's degree, before returning to the US in 1964. In 1966 she started her graduate studies to earn her doctorate at the University of Michigan
. She raised their children by herself after 1964.
In 1965, while teaching black students at Elizabeth City State College in North Carolina
, Midlo Hall encouraged them to organize armed resistance against the Ku Klux Klan
and to oppose the United States military intervention in Vietnam
. She chaired the Defense Committee for civil rights leader http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/emailAlbum?uname=ghall1929&aid=5307644475055127297 Robert F. Williams
when he was extradited from Michigan to Monroe, North Carolina
in 1975. During the 1960s and early 1970s, she published a number of influential essays in African-American magazines. Midlo Hall was fired and blacklisted in 1965 by Elizabeth City State College and the F.B.I. for her activities.
When she moved to Michigan, she worked in Detroit during 1965 and 1966, often with Grace Lee Boggs
, as a temporary legal secretary, keeping one step ahead of the F.B.I.'s trying to get them fired. The F.B.I. engineered the eviction of Midlo Hall and her two young children from three apartments which she rented in Michigan during her first year: two in Detroit and one in Ann Arbor. She managed to persist in completing coursework and her Ph.D. dissertation for her doctorate, which was published as a book by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1971.
After completing her doctorate, Midlo Hall started as an assistant professor at Rutgers University
in New Brunswick, New Jersey
, where she advanced to full professor in 1993. She has taught Caribbean and Latin American history, as well as classes on the African diaspora
. Publication in 1992 of Africans in Colonial Louisiana supported a reevaluation of African-American contributions to Louisiana and United States culture. She discovered significant colonial data in courthouses in Louisiana, and made use of national and state archives in France, Spain and Texas. Finding that French and Spanish records had more details about the origins of slaves than did those of the British and Americans, she developed important material on Africans in Louisiana, as well as linking them to their home cultures on the African continent.
She worked for 15 years, five years with research assistants, to develop a searchable database on the 100,000 slaves described in documents. These included Africans transported to Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries. The material was published on a CD in 2000 and online in 2001. The database includes such details as African slave names, gender, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slaves' testimony and emancipations.
While an influential academic work, her history Africans in Colonial Louisiana has also become popular among jazz
musicians in New Orleans. It remains popular among Afro-Americans and many whites in Louisiana and elsewhere, who refer to it as the "purple book". It is an important starting point for people wanting to learn more about African-American culture in Louisiana.
Midlo Hall is Professor Emerita of Rutgers. She is working on two books: a memoir White Girl in the Middle: My first 80 Years; and a study Diversity, Race Mixture, Slavery, and Freedom: Louisiana 1699-1820; a well as the Western Hemisphere Slave Database.
Midlo Hall's work has been distinguished by her use of original language archives in France and Spain, as well as of records in Latin America, providing a broad base for comparison of slavery in different societies. She has published internationally in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and lectured internationally in English, French and Spanish.
In the mid-1960s, Haywood worked in Harlem, New York with Jesse Gray
, later elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He also worked with James Haughton
and Josh Lawrence, leaders of the Harlem Tenants' Union and Harlem Fight Back during 1964 and 1965. He moved to Oakland, California
, in 1966, then to Detroit, Michigan, with the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Haywood then returned to Mexico. In 1970 he returned permanently to the United States at the invitation of Howard W. Dodson, then Director of the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta, Georgia
.
, Ann Arbor, Michigan
and later ones associated with her work on Africans in Louisiana at the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University
, New Orleans, Louisiana. (See Amistad Research Center http://www.amistadresearchcenter.org/.)
The Harry Haywood papers are housed at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan
, Ann Arbor; and the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Division; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
.
After divorce, she next married Harry Haywood
in 1956. He was a political activist, member of the Communist Party, USA, and theoretician of self-determination for the African-American nation of the Deep South
. She changed her name at marriage to conform to his legal birth name of Haywood Hall. They were married until his death in 1985.
Two children were born from this marriage: Dr. Haywood Hall (b. 1956 in Brooklyn, NY), an emergency physician working in Latin America to develop emergency care http://www.pacemd.org and medical Spanish http://www.medspanish.com cultural literacy. Dr. Rebecca Hall (b. 1963 in Mexico City) is an attorney and holds a Ph.D. in history.
Between 1953 and 1964, Midlo Hall collaborated with Haywood in freelance writing about theoretical aspects of the civil rights and black protest movement in the United States. Some of these articles were a joint publication in several issues of Soulbook Magazine, which began publication in Berkeley, California
in 1964.
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
, and Louisiana
Louisiana
Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governments equivalent to counties...
(United States), and the African Diaspora
African diaspora
The African diaspora was the movement of Africans and their descendants to places throughout the world—predominantly to the Americas also to Europe, the Middle East and other places around the globe...
in the Americas. Discovering a cache of extensive European colonial records in Louisiana, she created a database of records of descriptions of over 100,000 enslaved Africans. It has become a prominent resource for historical and genealogical research of African Americans. In addition to earning recognition in academia, Hall has been featured in the New York Times, People Magazine, ABC News
ABC News
ABC News is the news gathering and broadcasting division of American broadcast television network ABC, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company...
, and other popular outlets for her contributions to scholarship, genealogy, and the critical reevaluation of the history of slavery.
Midlo Hall is an award-winning author and Professor Emerita of Latin American and Caribbean History, Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
, New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
. She is also an International Advisory Board Member of the Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman Harriet Tubman Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Harriet Ross; (1820 – 1913) was an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy during the American Civil War. After escaping from slavery, into which she was born, she made thirteen missions to rescue more than 70 slaves...
Resource Institute for the Study of Global Migrations of African Peoples, York University
York University
York University is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's third-largest university, Ontario's second-largest graduate school, and Canada's leading interdisciplinary university....
, Toronto, Canada. She now (2010) teaches Africans in the Atlantic world at Michigan State University
Michigan State University
Michigan State University is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Founded in 1855, it was the pioneer land-grant institution and served as a model for future land-grant colleges in the United States under the 1862 Morrill Act.MSU pioneered the studies of packaging,...
as Adjunct Professor of history.
Her work Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992) traced to original cultures the various ethnic African origins of enslaved Africans. She changed the way in which several related disciplines are researched and taught in the United States. She traced Africans to specific cultures of the continent, and added to scholarly understanding of the multicultural and diverse origins of American culture. She was able to demonstrate distinct patterns of settlement and re-Africanization of Louisiana, resulting in its unique culture in the American South.
Early life and education
Gwendolyn Midlo was born 27 June 1929 in New Orleans, LouisianaNew Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans is a major United States port and the largest city and metropolitan area in the state of Louisiana. The New Orleans metropolitan area has a population of 1,235,650 as of 2009, the 46th largest in the USA. The New Orleans – Metairie – Bogalusa combined statistical area has a population...
, the daughter of Ethel and Herman Lazard Midlo, a civil rights and labor attorney. Her parents were of Russian- and Polish-Jewish ancestry. She was influenced by her father's activism. In 1990 her mother founded the Ethel and Herman Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans
University of New Orleans
The University of New Orleans, often referred to locally as UNO, is a medium-sized public urban university located on the New Orleans Lakefront within New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. It is a member of the LSU System and the Urban 13 association. Currently UNO is without a proper chancellor...
, where her father had donated his papers and archives before his death in 1978.
Midlo has had a career marked by early political activism as well as academic scholarship. After World War II, at age 16 in 1945, Hall helped organize and participated in the New Orleans Youth Council, an interracial, direct-action community organization which encouraged and helped African-American voter registration and defied racial segregation
Racial segregation
Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...
laws. In 1946 she was elected to the Executive Board of the Southern Negro Youth Congress
Southern Negro Youth Congress
The Southern Negro Youth Congress was established in 1937 at a conference in Richmond, Virginia. The first gathering of the Southern Negro Youth Congress consisted of a wide range of individuals...
at the Southern Youth Legislature in Columbia, South Carolina
Columbia, South Carolina
Columbia is the state capital and largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina. The population was 129,272 according to the 2010 census. Columbia is the county seat of Richland County, but a portion of the city extends into neighboring Lexington County. The city is the center of a metropolitan...
. It had operated since 1937 to end lynching
Lynching
Lynching is an extrajudicial execution carried out by a mob, often by hanging, but also by burning at the stake or shooting, in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a population of people. It is related to other means of social control that...
, racial discrimination and segregation, and to achieve voting rights for all.
Midlo helped organize Young Progressives, an interracial youth and student movement in segregated New Orleans that included students from Tulane University
Tulane University
Tulane University is a private, nonsectarian research university located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States...
, Newcomb College, and Loyola University
Loyola University New Orleans
Loyola University New Orleans is a private, co-educational and Jesuit university located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. Originally established as Loyola College in 1904, the institution was chartered as a university in 1912. It bears the name of the Jesuit patron, Saint Ignatius of Loyola...
(white colleges) and from Dillard
Dillard University
Dillard University is a private, historically black liberal arts college in New Orleans, Louisiana. Founded in 1930 incorporating earlier institutions that went back to 1869, it is affiliated with the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church....
and Xavier universities (historically black colleges.) She was active in the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace
Henry A. Wallace
Henry Agard Wallace was the 33rd Vice President of the United States , the Secretary of Agriculture , and the Secretary of Commerce . In the 1948 presidential election, Wallace was the nominee of the Progressive Party.-Early life:Henry A...
, the Progressive Party
Progressive Party (United States, 1948)
The United States Progressive Party of 1948 was a left-wing political party that ran former Vice President Henry A. Wallace of Iowa for president and U.S. Senator Glen H. Taylor of Idaho for vice president in 1948.-Foundation:...
candidate. She organized in New Orleans, rural Louisiana, and in Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta is the capital and most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia. According to the 2010 census, Atlanta's population is 420,003. Atlanta is the cultural and economic center of the Atlanta metropolitan area, which is home to 5,268,860 people and is the ninth largest metropolitan area in...
. She also was active in the Civil Rights Congress
Civil Rights Congress
The Civil Rights Congress was a civil rights organization formed in 1946 by a merger of the International Labor Defense and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties. It became known for involvement in civil rights cases such as the Trenton Six and justice for Isaiah Nixon. The CRC...
and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.
Starting at Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University
Tulane University
Tulane University is a private, nonsectarian research university located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States...
, Midlo studied history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
. After years of political activism and marriage, Midlo Hall completed some of her academic studies outside the United States, which gave her broader insight as she acquired fluency in French and Spanish. She earned a B.A. in history at Mexico City College
Mexico City College
Mexico City College was founded in 1940, as an English speaking junior college in Mexico City, Mexico.In 1946 the college switched to a 4 year Bachelor of Arts degree-awarding institution, then changed its name to University of the Americas in 1963 and in 1968 to Universidad de las Americas,...
, 1962; followed by her master's in Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
n History, also at Mexico City College in 1963-64.
While a doctoral graduate student at the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
, Midlo Hall published an article advocating medical treatment for heroin addicts: "Mechanisms for Exploiting the Black Community", The Negro Digest
The Negro Digest
The Negro Digest was a popular African American magazine founded in November 1942 by John H. Johnson. It was first presented locally in Chicago, Illinois. The Negro Digest was quite similar to the Reader's Digest; however, it was aimed to target positive influences in the African American...
, November 1969. It inspired demonstrations in the streets of Detroit. She organized methadone
Methadone
Methadone is a synthetic opioid, used medically as an analgesic and a maintenance anti-addictive for use in patients with opioid dependency. It was developed in Germany in 1937...
-maintenance treatment programs in both Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County. The 2010 census places the population at 113,934, making it the sixth largest city in Michigan. The Ann Arbor Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 344,791 as of 2010...
. Adoption of such treatment by major cities helped reduce heroin use and the crime rate in the inner city of Detroit and others. Midlo Hall earned a Ph.D. in Latin American History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1970.
Academic career
Midlo Hall and Haywood moved to Mexico City, Mexico in early 1959, shortly before Haywood was expelled from the Communist PartyCommunist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
over ideological differences. There Midlo Hall completed her B.A. and master's degree, before returning to the US in 1964. In 1966 she started her graduate studies to earn her doctorate at the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
. She raised their children by herself after 1964.
In 1965, while teaching black students at Elizabeth City State College in North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
, Midlo Hall encouraged them to organize armed resistance against the Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
and to oppose the United States military intervention in Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
. She chaired the Defense Committee for civil rights leader http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/emailAlbum?uname=ghall1929&aid=5307644475055127297 Robert F. Williams
Robert F. Williams
Robert Franklin Williams was a civil rights leader, the president of the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP chapter in the 1950s and early 1960s, and author. At a time when racial tension was high and official abuses were rampant, Williams was a key figure in promoting both integration and armed black...
when he was extradited from Michigan to Monroe, North Carolina
Monroe, North Carolina
Monroe is a city in Union County, North Carolina, United States. The population was 36,397 as of the 2010 census. It is the seat of government of Union County and is also part of the Charlotte-Gastonia-Rock Hill, NC-SC Metropolitan area.-Geography:...
in 1975. During the 1960s and early 1970s, she published a number of influential essays in African-American magazines. Midlo Hall was fired and blacklisted in 1965 by Elizabeth City State College and the F.B.I. for her activities.
When she moved to Michigan, she worked in Detroit during 1965 and 1966, often with Grace Lee Boggs
Grace Lee Boggs
Grace Lee Boggs is an author, lifelong social activist and feminist. She is known for her years of political collaboration with C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s. She eventually went off in her own political direction in the 1960s with her husband of some forty years, James...
, as a temporary legal secretary, keeping one step ahead of the F.B.I.'s trying to get them fired. The F.B.I. engineered the eviction of Midlo Hall and her two young children from three apartments which she rented in Michigan during her first year: two in Detroit and one in Ann Arbor. She managed to persist in completing coursework and her Ph.D. dissertation for her doctorate, which was published as a book by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1971.
After completing her doctorate, Midlo Hall started as an assistant professor at Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
in New Brunswick, New Jersey
New Brunswick, New Jersey
New Brunswick is a city in Middlesex County, New Jersey, USA. It is the county seat and the home of Rutgers University. The city is located on the Northeast Corridor rail line, southwest of Manhattan, on the southern bank of the Raritan River. At the 2010 United States Census, the population of...
, where she advanced to full professor in 1993. She has taught Caribbean and Latin American history, as well as classes on the African diaspora
Diaspora
A diaspora is "the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland" or "people dispersed by whatever cause to more than one location", or "people settled far from their ancestral homelands".The word has come to refer to historical mass-dispersions of...
. Publication in 1992 of Africans in Colonial Louisiana supported a reevaluation of African-American contributions to Louisiana and United States culture. She discovered significant colonial data in courthouses in Louisiana, and made use of national and state archives in France, Spain and Texas. Finding that French and Spanish records had more details about the origins of slaves than did those of the British and Americans, she developed important material on Africans in Louisiana, as well as linking them to their home cultures on the African continent.
She worked for 15 years, five years with research assistants, to develop a searchable database on the 100,000 slaves described in documents. These included Africans transported to Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries. The material was published on a CD in 2000 and online in 2001. The database includes such details as African slave names, gender, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slaves' testimony and emancipations.
While an influential academic work, her history Africans in Colonial Louisiana has also become popular among jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
musicians in New Orleans. It remains popular among Afro-Americans and many whites in Louisiana and elsewhere, who refer to it as the "purple book". It is an important starting point for people wanting to learn more about African-American culture in Louisiana.
Midlo Hall is Professor Emerita of Rutgers. She is working on two books: a memoir White Girl in the Middle: My first 80 Years; and a study Diversity, Race Mixture, Slavery, and Freedom: Louisiana 1699-1820; a well as the Western Hemisphere Slave Database.
Midlo Hall's work has been distinguished by her use of original language archives in France and Spain, as well as of records in Latin America, providing a broad base for comparison of slavery in different societies. She has published internationally in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and lectured internationally in English, French and Spanish.
In the mid-1960s, Haywood worked in Harlem, New York with Jesse Gray
Jesse Gray
Jesse Gray was a leader of rent strikes in Harlem in the 1960s and served as a New York State Assemblyman from 1972 to 1974.-Biography:...
, later elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He also worked with James Haughton
James Haughton
James Haughton was an Irish social reformer and temperance activist.-Life:Haughton, son of Samuel Pearson Haughton , by Mary, daughter of James Pim of Rushin, Queen's County , Ireland, was born in Carlow and educated at Ballitor, County Kildare, from 1807 to 1810, under James White, a quaker...
and Josh Lawrence, leaders of the Harlem Tenants' Union and Harlem Fight Back during 1964 and 1965. He moved to Oakland, California
Oakland, California
Oakland is a major West Coast port city on San Francisco Bay in the U.S. state of California. It is the eighth-largest city in the state with a 2010 population of 390,724...
, in 1966, then to Detroit, Michigan, with the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Haywood then returned to Mexico. In 1970 he returned permanently to the United States at the invitation of Howard W. Dodson, then Director of the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta is the capital and most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia. According to the 2010 census, Atlanta's population is 420,003. Atlanta is the cultural and economic center of the Atlanta metropolitan area, which is home to 5,268,860 people and is the ninth largest metropolitan area in...
.
Collected papers
The Gwendolyn Midlo Hall papers (1939–1991) are housed at the Bentley Historical Library, University of MichiganUniversity of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County. The 2010 census places the population at 113,934, making it the sixth largest city in Michigan. The Ann Arbor Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 344,791 as of 2010...
and later ones associated with her work on Africans in Louisiana at the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University
Tulane University
Tulane University is a private, nonsectarian research university located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States...
, New Orleans, Louisiana. (See Amistad Research Center http://www.amistadresearchcenter.org/.)
The Harry Haywood papers are housed at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
, Ann Arbor; and the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Division; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
New York Public Library
The New York Public Library is the largest public library in North America and is one of the United States' most significant research libraries...
.
Published Books and Databases
- Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971)
- Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1992) (This won nine book prizes, including the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association.)
- Love, War, and the 96th Engineers (Colored): The New Guinea Diaries of Captain Hyman Samuelson During World War II (editor; University of Illinois Press, 1995)
- Louisiana Slave Database and Louisiana Free Database 1819-1820, in Hall, Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, Compact Disk Publication (Louisiana State University Press, 2000) and web portal http://www.ibiblio.org/laslave (2001); and
- Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
Legacy and honors (selected)
- National Endowment for the HumanitiesNational Endowment for the HumanitiesThe National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...
"We the People Fellowship" 2006-07. - Distinguished Service Award, Organization of American HistoriansOrganization of American HistoriansThe Organization of American Historians , formerly known as the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, is the largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history. OAH's members in the U.S...
(2004); - Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, elected by the National Assembly of France (1997);
- Guggenheim FellowshipGuggenheim FellowshipGuggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
, 1996; and - National Endowment for the HumanitiesNational Endowment for the HumanitiesThe National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...
contract, 1991-1996.
Marriage and family
Midlo was married before 1951. Her oldest son Leonid Avram Yuspeh was born in Paris, France in 1951 from this marriage.After divorce, she next married Harry Haywood
Harry Haywood
Harry Haywood was a leading figure in both the Communist Party of the United States and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . He contributed major theory to Marxist thinking on the national question of African Americans in the United States...
in 1956. He was a political activist, member of the Communist Party, USA, and theoretician of self-determination for the African-American nation of the Deep South
Deep South
The Deep South is a descriptive category of the cultural and geographic subregions in the American South. Historically, it is differentiated from the "Upper South" as being the states which were most dependent on plantation type agriculture during the pre-Civil War period...
. She changed her name at marriage to conform to his legal birth name of Haywood Hall. They were married until his death in 1985.
Two children were born from this marriage: Dr. Haywood Hall (b. 1956 in Brooklyn, NY), an emergency physician working in Latin America to develop emergency care http://www.pacemd.org and medical Spanish http://www.medspanish.com cultural literacy. Dr. Rebecca Hall (b. 1963 in Mexico City) is an attorney and holds a Ph.D. in history.
Between 1953 and 1964, Midlo Hall collaborated with Haywood in freelance writing about theoretical aspects of the civil rights and black protest movement in the United States. Some of these articles were a joint publication in several issues of Soulbook Magazine, which began publication in Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
in 1964.
External links
- Louisiana Slave Database, available free of charge for download, together with search engine
Further reading
- Wold, "Courthouse Records Reveal Trove of Data About Slavery", The Advocate, Feb. 18, 2001
- Erin Hayes, "Rescuing Louisiana Pasts: Research Yields Treasure Trove of Data on Slaves", ABC News, July 30, 2000
- David Firestone, "Identity Restored to 100,000 Louisiana Slaves", The New York Times
- Jeffrey Ghannam, "Repairing the Past", American Bar Association Journal, November 2000
- "Southern Negro Youth Congress (1937-1949)", BlackPast.orgBlackPast.orgBlackPast.org is a web-based free content reference center that is dedicated primarily to the understanding of African American history and the history of people of African ancestry...
- Ned Sublette, "Interview with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall", Afropop Worldwide, 2005
- Rediscovering America: Thirty-Five Years of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Report to Congress pursuant to PL 101-152. ISBN 0-942310-02-0, p. 19.
- Congressional Record, Proceedings and Debates of the 109th Congress, Second Session, May 10, 2006. House of Representatives, Hon. Major R Owens of New York. "RECOGNIZING THE SHARED HISTORY OF SLAVERY OF FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES". http://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox/11f0709f9be6056a
Midlo Hall Civil Rights-Era articles
- "Negro Slaves in the Americas", FreedomwaysFreedomwaysFreedomways was the leading African-American theoretical, political and cultural journal of the 1960s-1980s. It began publishing in 1961 and ceased in 1985....
, Vol. 4, No. 3, Summer 1964, pp. 296–327. - "Detroit's Moment of Truth", Freedomways, Vol. 7, No. 1, Fall 1967.
- "St. Malcolm and the Black Revolutionist", Negro Digest, November 1967.
- "Black Resistance in Colonial Haiti", Negro Digest, February 1968.
- "Race and Class in Brazil", Freedomways, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter, 1968).
- "The Myth of Benevolent Spanish Slave Laws", Negro Digest, March 1969.
- "Africans in the Americas", Negro Digest, March 1969.
- "Rural, Black College", Negro Digest, March 1969.
- "Junkie Myths", The Black Liberator, July 1969.
- "Mechanisms for Exploiting the Black Community", Parts 1 and 2, Negro Digest, October and November 1969.
- "What Toussaint L'OuvertureToussaint L'OuvertureFrançois-Dominique Toussaint Louverture , also Toussaint Bréda, Toussaint-Louverture was the leader of the Haitian Revolution. His military genius and political acumen led to the establishment of the independent black state of Haiti, transforming an entire society of slaves into a free,...
Can Teach Us", Black World, February 1972.