Early life and education
Sarah L. Wilkerson was born in 1956 [1] to Daniel Coyle Wilkerson Jr.,a private surgeon in Virginia,and his first wife,Rea (née Raisig). [2] She had one sister and three brothers. [3]
She completed her M.A. at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1985. Her thesis was titled The Emerging Political Consciousness of Gertrude Weil:Education and Women's Clubs,1879-1914. [4] She earned a Ph.D. at UNC Chapel Hill in 1995. [5] Her dissertation was titled Women and the Transformation of American Politics:North Carolina,1898-1940. Jane De Hart was her doctoral advisor. [6]
Career
Wilkerson Freeman joined the faculty at Arkansas State University in 1996 as an assistant professor of history. [7] [8] She was promoted to associate professor in 2001 [9] and full professor in 2010. [7] [10]
With Beverly Greene Bond,Wilkerson Freeman is co-editor of Tennessee Women:Their Lives and Times, a two-volume series published in 2009 and 2015. [11] [12] She has also written about white women and the poll tax,and their advocacy to remove its obstacle to white women's suffrage that remained even after the Nineteenth Amendment was passed. [10] [13] Her studies on women's suffrage and activism in the US South have demonstrated that women were particularly active in seeking change for their communities,though their efforts in the Progressive Era strove to attain liberal socio-political change while simultaneously perpetuating white supremacy and racist policies. [14] Her work has also explored Southern women's drive for change,regional engagement,and increasing involvement in the Democratic Party during the 1930s. [15]
Wilkerson Freeman has also served as an art curator,working on photographic collections like the archives of photographer Jack Robinson [16] and creating an exhibit of rare photographs of the Rohwer Japanese American internment camp in Arkansas. [17] Her work on Robinson began when Dan Oppenheimer,a Memphis art salesman who had employed Robinson as a stained-glass artist,inherited around 150,000 negatives when Robinson died. Unaware that Robinson had been a Vogue photographer,he contacted Wilkerson Freeman to review the negatives. She discovered that they were an archive documenting New Orleans' Canal Street,Mardi Gras festivities,and the fluidity of race,gender,and sexuality in the McCarthy era. [18] In 2013,the curated exhibit was shown at the Sheraton New Orleans. [18]
Wilkerson Freeman's project on Rohwer began in 2012 when she was contacted by the children of Paul and Ann Faris,who had photographed subjects of the camp in 1945. The Faris couple took the photographs and conducted interviews for Allen H. Eaton's book,Beauty Behind Barbed Wire:The Arts of the Japanese in Our War Relocation Camps. The couple were educators in the 1940s and journalists in the 1950s—Paul wrote for the Arkansas Democrat and Ann freelanced for the Arkansas Gazette . [19] [20] Sorting through 10,000 negatives,Wilkerson Freeman selected photographs which would preserve the history of the internment camps. They were first displayed at Arkansas State University in April 2014,and then the exhibit toured as far away as Memphis and San Francisco. [19] The second exhibition on the camps included additional photographs by the Faris couple and was held in Butler Center for Arkansas Studies from August to December 2017. [20] Two additional exhibitions were planned for 2018. [19]
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