Sarah Wilkerson Freeman | |
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Born | Sarah L. Wilkerson 1956 (age 66–67) |
Occupation(s) | Historian, curator |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
Thesis | Women and the Transformation of American Politics: North Carolina, 1898-1940 (1995) |
Doctoral advisor | Jane De Hart |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Arkansas State University |
Notable works | Tennessee Women:Their Lives and Times |
Sarah L. Wilkerson Freeman (born 1956) is an American historian and curator who is a professor of history at Arkansas State University. She co-edited Tennessee Women:Their Lives and Times, a two-volume series with historian Beverly Greene Bond and has written on Southern women's activism from the Progressive Era to the McCarthy Era. Her curatorial work has focused on little-known chapters in Southern history,which included the fluidity of race,gender,and sexuality in 1950s New Orleans and Japanese internments in Arkansas in the 1940s.
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]
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]
She and her husband Herschel Freeman have two children. [21] They reside in Germantown,Tennessee. [22]
The Deep South or the Lower South is a cultural and geographic subregion of the Southern United States. The term was first used to describe the states which were most economically dependent on plantations and slavery. After the American Civil War ended in 1865, the region suffered economic hardship and was a major site of racial tension during and after the Reconstruction era. Before 1945, the Deep South was often referred to as the "Cotton States" since cotton was the primary cash crop for economic production. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s helped usher in a new era, sometimes referred to as the New South.
Southern Democrats are affiliates of the U.S. Democratic Party who reside in the Southern United States.
This is a selected bibliography of the main scholarly books and articles of Reconstruction, the period after the American Civil War, 1863–1877.
In the United States, Southern Unionists were white Southerners living in the Confederate States of America opposed to secession. Many fought for the Union during the Civil War. These people are also referred to as Southern Loyalists, Union Loyalists, or Lincoln's Loyalists. Pro-Confederates in the South derided them as "Tories". During Reconstruction, these terms were replaced by "scalawag", which covered all Southern whites who supported the Republican Party.
A poll tax is a tax of a fixed sum on every liable individual, without reference to income or resources. Although often associated with states of the former Confederate States of America, poll taxes were also in place in some northern and western states, including California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Wisconsin. Poll taxes had been a major source of government funding among the colonies which formed the United States. Poll taxes made up from one-third to one-half of the tax revenue of colonial Massachusetts. Various privileges of citizenship, including voter registration or issuance of driving licenses and resident hunting and fishing licenses, were conditioned on payment of poll taxes to encourage the collection of this tax revenue. Property taxes assumed a larger share of tax revenues as land values rose when population increases encouraged settlement of the American West. Some western states found no need for poll tax requirements; but poll taxes and payment incentives remained in eastern states. Poll taxes became a tool of disenfranchisement in the South during Jim Crow, following the end of Reconstruction. This persisted until court action, following the ratification of the 24th Amendment in 1964, ended the practice.
Jenny McIntosh was the first signer of the Cherokee women's petition of May 2, 1817, one of the first collective women's petitions sent to any body in the United States, and arguably the first women's anti-removal petition in U.S. history. She became a landholder under the Treaty of 1817, and later made other innovations in petitioning, authoring one of the first petitions for Native women's equal rights to the Tennessee legislature in 1822.
The Georgia Women of Achievement (GWA) recognizes women natives or residents of the U.S. state of Georgia for their significant achievements or statewide contributions. The concept was first proposed by Rosalynn Carter in 1988. The first induction was in 1992 at Wesleyan College, and has continued annually. The induction ceremonies are held each year during March, designated as Women's History Month. The organization consists of a Board of Trustees and a Board of Selections. Nominees must have been dead no less than ten years. Georgians, or those associated with Georgia, are selected based on the individual's impact on society. Nominations are proposed through documentation and an online nomination form, and must be submitted prior to October of any given year. GWA has traveling exhibits and speakers available upon request.
Lilian Wyckoff Johnson was an American teacher of history and an advocate for rural reform and civil rights.
The Tennessee Women's Hall of Fame is a non-profit, volunteer organization that recognizes women who have contributed to history of the U.S. state of Tennessee.
The Nineteenth Century Club is a historic philanthropic and cultural women's club based in Memphis, Tennessee. The Nineteenth Century Club adopted the idea that the community was an extended "household" that would benefit from the "gentler spirit" and "uplifting influence" of women, and shifted towards civic reform. The club primarily focused on the needs of women and children, addressing public problems such as sanitation, health, education, employment, and labor conditions.
Clara Conway was a Public School Teacher, School Administrator in the Memphis School district and an early woman's political activist. She founded the Clara Conway Institute for Girls in Memphis, Tennessee and an application was granted for chartership 1 June 1885 and was a founding member of the Nineteenth Century Club in 1890.
Nettie Langston Napier was an African-American activist for the rights of women of color during the early part of the 20th century. She lived in Nashville, Tennessee.
Hulda Margaret Lyttle Frazier was an American nurse educator and hospital administrator who spent most of her career in Nashville, Tennessee at Meharry Medical College School of Nursing and affiliated Hubbard Hospital. Lyttle advocated for the modernization and professionalization of African American nurses' training programs, and improved practice standards in hospitals that served African Americans.
Carolanne Marie "Candie" Carawan (née Anderson) is an American civil rights activist, singer and author known for popularizing the protest song "We Shall Overcome" to the American Civil Rights Movement with her husband Guy Carawan in the 1960s.
Marion Scudder Griffin was an American lawyer, and the first woman to practice law in Tennessee.
The Millie E. Hale Hospital was a hospital in Nashville, Tennessee that served African-American patients. It was the first hospital to serve black patients year-round. The hospital was opened by a husband and wife team, Dr. John Henry Hale and Millie E. Hale in July 1916. The couple first turned their home into a hospital that would grow to house 75 patients by 1923. In addition to the hospital, there was a community center and ladies' auxiliary that provided health services and also recreational and charity work to the black community. The hospital also provided parks for children who had no park to use in the Jim Crow era. In 1938, the hospital closed, but some social services continued afterwards.
Pauline Van de Graaff Orr was an American educator and suffragist based in Mississippi.
The women's poll tax repeal movement was a movement in the United States, predominantly led by women, that attempted to secure the abolition of poll taxes as a prerequisite for voting in the Southern states. The movement began shortly after the ratification in 1920 of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which granted suffrage to women. Before obtaining the right to vote, women were not obliged to pay the tax, but shortly after the Nineteenth Amendment became law, Southern states began examining how poll tax statutes could be applied to women. For example, North and South Carolina exempted women from payment of the tax, while Georgia did not require women to pay it unless they registered to vote. In other Southern states, the tax was due cumulatively for each year someone had been eligible to vote.
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National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax was an organization founded in 1941 by civil rights activists Joseph Gelders and Virginia Durr to obtain federal action to override poll tax legislation in the Southern United States, which was used to restrict voter rights.