Brenda Elaine Stevenson | |
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Born | Portsmouth, Virginia, U.S. |
Alma mater | University of Virginia; Yale University |
Occupation | Historian |
Known for | Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women's History at St John's College, Oxford |
Notable work | Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South |
Spouse | James H. Cones III |
Children | 1 |
Parent(s) | James William and Emma Gerald Stevenson |
Brenda Elaine Stevenson is an American historian specializing in the history of the Southern United States and African American history, particularly slavery, gender, race and race riots. She is Professor and Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History and Professor in African-American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). [1] As of Autumn 2021, she was appointed inaugural Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women's History at St John's College, University of Oxford. [2]
Stevenson was born and raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, the second child of James William and Emma Gerald Stevenson. [3] She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia, where she was a DuPont Regional Scholar and an Echols Scholar. At Virginia, she studied with Paul Gaston, Joseph Miller, Arnold Rampersad, Vivian Gordon, Ray Nelson and Barry Gaspar. [4] [5]
She then enrolled in Yale University's M.A. program in African American Studies. Stevenson began her edition of The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke while in this program, and this work became part of the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers. She continued in the Yale Ph.D. program in American history; she studied with John Blassingame, David Brion Davis, Nancy Cott, and Edmund S. Morgan.
Her Ph.D. dissertation became an award-winning book, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South. This work challenged the revisionist claim of Herbert Gutman, John Blassingame and Eugene Genovese, among others, that enslaved families had a nuclear structure and male head, documenting instead that extended families were the most significant form of slave family structure, but that matrifocal and matrilocal kinship groups, slave women, as mothers particularly, were at the center of slave family life. The book received the Gustavus Myers Book Prize. [6]
Her next major study, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender and the Origins of the L.A. Riots, challenged male-centered analyses of U.S. race riots, proposing that the 1992 Los Angeles riot erupted not only as a response to the Rodney King trial, but as a response to an earlier trial that ended with a controversial sentencing of a shopkeeper found guilty of murdering an unarmed black girl. [7] Hector Tobar described Contested Murder in his Los Angeles Times review as "an excellent and methodically researched new history." [8] The Library Journal review states that: "Stevenson skillfully combines the depth of a scholarly work with the rich details of a tragic novel." [9] Contested Murder was awarded the Organization of American Historian's 2014 James A. Rawley Prize for the best book on the history of race relations in the U.S. [10] and Women's eNews honored it with the 2015 Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism. [11] [12] [13] In 2015, she published What is Slavery?, which surveys the history of human bondage in pre-modern societies and black enslavement in the United States with emphasis on the social history elements. She also served as a senior editor for the three-volume Encyclopedia of Black Women's History, and is co-author of Underground Railroad.
Stevenson has served as both chair of the departments of history and African American Studies at UCLA. She also has taught at Wesleyan University, Rice University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Occidental College. She is a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. [14]
In October 2020, it was announced that Stevenson had been appointed the first Hillary Rodham Clinton Professor of Women's History at the University of Oxford. [15] This appointment marks forty years since the first admission of female students to St John's College in 1979. [2] In October 2021, Stevenson was nominated to serve as a member of the newly formed Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board. [16]
In April 2023, Stevenson published her first work exclusively on the history of the enslaved Black family in the United States. What Sorrows Labour in My Parents' Breast? tracks the long history of the enslaved Black family, illuminating the critical role of family in the struggle, survival, and triumph of Black Americans. "Black families," Stevenson argues, "matter profoundly." [17]
Brenda Stevenson is married to clinical psychologist and author James H. Cones III. They have one daughter, Emma Cones.
Lance Allan Ito is an American retired judge, best known for presiding over the criminal trial for the O. J. Simpson murder case, held in the Los Angeles County Superior Court in 1995.
John Clinton Porter was a U.S. political figure. The Los Angeles Times wrote that he represented a "unique mixture of reform politics and xenophobic Protestant populism [that] took him quite literally from the junk yard to City Hall." Porter was a member of the Ku Klux Klan during its popular resurgence in the early 1920s.
Biddy Mason was an African-American nurse and a Californian real estate entrepreneur and philanthropist. She was one of the founders of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, California. Enslaved upon birth, she developed a variety of skills and developed knowledge of medicine, child care, and livestock care. A California court granted her and her daughter’s freedom in 1856.
Joyce Ann Karlin Fahey is an American lawyer and politician. She served as both a federal prosecutor and a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. She is known for having sentenced Soon Ja Du, the merchant who killed 15 year old Latasha Harlins with a fatal shot to the back of her head, to only five years' probation and 400 hours of community service, with no jail time. The sentence was widely condemned, including by the LA County District Attorney and black community leaders in Los Angeles, and has been cited by some as a catalyst for the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
The institution of slavery in North America existed from the earliest years of the colonial history of the United States until 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery throughout the United States except as punishment for a crime. It was also abolished among the sovereign Indian tribes in Indian Territory by new peace treaties which the US required after the Civil War.
Latasha Harlins was an African American girl who was fatally shot at age 15 by Soon Ja Du, a 49-year-old Korean American convenience store owner. Du was tried and convicted of voluntary manslaughter over the killing of Harlins, based in part on security camera footage. The judge sentenced Du to 10 years in state prison but the sentence was suspended and the defendant was instead placed on five years' probation with 400 hours of community service and payment of $500 restitution, and Harlins' funeral costs. The sentencing was widely regarded as extremely light, and a failed appeal reportedly contributed to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, especially the targeting of Koreatown. The killing of Harlins came 13 days after the videotaped beating of Rodney King.
The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.
Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America is a 1995 history book about nineteenth century slave children in America by Wilma King. As the first full-length book on the subject, it began the scholarship of slave childhood. The book uses historical documents to argue that enslaved children were deprived of experiences now understood to constitute childhood, due to early work responsibilities, frequent bodily and emotional trauma, and separations from family. The book covers themes of the children's education, leisure, religion, transitions to freedmen, and work expectations. It was published in the Indiana University Press's Blacks in the Diaspora series, and a revised edition was released in 2011.
Deborah Gray White is the Board of Governors Professor of History and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. In addition to teaching at Rutgers, she also directed, "The Black Atlantic: Race, Nation and Gender", a project at The Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis from 1997 to 1999. Throughout 2000-2003 she was the chair of the history department at Rutgers. White has been awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellowship, the Carter G. Woodson Medallion for excellence in African American history, and has also received an Honorary Doctorate from her undergraduate alma mater, Binghamton University. She currently heads the Scarlet and Black Project which investigates Native Americans and African Americans in the history of Rutgers University.
The History of slavery in Michigan includes the pro-slavery and anti-slavery efforts of the state's residents prior to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865.
Jessica Millward is an American historian who focuses on African American history, early America, African diaspora, slavery, and gender. Her work focuses on the female slave experience by emphasizing narratives of black women during slavery.
Edwin Epps was a slaveholder on a cotton plantation in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. He was the third and longest enslaver of Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. in 1841 and forced into slavery. On January 3, 1853, Northup left Epps's property and returned to his family in New York.
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an American historian. She is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. She is an expert in African-American history, the history of American slavery, and women's and gender history.
Daina Ramey Berry is an American historian and academic who is the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She was formerly the associate dean of the graduate school and chair of the history department at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies gender and slavery, as well as black women's history in the United States. She has written books about the connection between the idea of skilled work and the gender of enslaved people in antebellum Georgia, the economic history of slavery in the United States, and the historical contributions of African American women to the politics and governance of the United States and to securing their own rights.
Ariela Julie Gross is an American historian. Previously the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law (USC), she is now a Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law.
Jeff Forret is an American historian and professor at Lamar University.
A Love Song for Latasha is a 2019 American biographical documentary short film directed by Sophia Nahli Allison. Drawing on memories from the subject's cousin and best friend, the film reimagines the life of Latasha Harlins, a Black Los Angeles girl shot and killed by a convenience store owner in 1991. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 93rd Academy Awards.
Sophia Nahli Allison is an American documentary filmmaker and photographer. Her documentary short A Love Song for Latasha (2019) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. It debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival and screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. Allison directed and co-wrote the 2021 HBO Max special Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground.
Nikki M. Taylor is an American historian. She is professor of history at Howard University and author of four books on nineteenth-century African-American history.
Marriage of enslaved people in the United States was generally not legal before the American Civil War (1861–1865). Enslaved African Americans were considered chattel legally, and they were denied human or civil rights until the United States abolished slavery with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Both state and federal laws denied, or rarely defined, rights for enslaved people.