Collecting area: Black feminist

Acclaimed writer, women’s rights advocate, journalist, and educator, Zelma (Zee) Inez Edgell was born in Belize City, Belize in 1940. Zee Edgell holds an undergraduate degree in journalism from Polytechnic-Regent Street (now the University of Westminster) and a Master’s in Liberal Studies from Kent State University. Edgell has published four novels and several short stories throughout her illustrious career. Her breakout novel, Beka Lamb, published in 1982, was the first book to be released in a newly independent Belize (formerly British Honduras) and would gain international notoriety going on to win the Fawcett Society Book Prize. Before becoming a celebrated novelist Edgell spent her early years working as a journalist, first for Jamaica’s The Daily Gleaner and then as founding editor of the Belize-based newspaper The Reporter. Edgell also served as director of the Belize Women’s Bureau, a position she held under two different administrations. As an educator, Edgell taught for many years at Belizes’ St. Catherine Academy, an all-girls catholic school she attended as a youth. She lectured at the University College of Belize as well. Edgell would spend the remainder of her teaching career as a tenured professor in the English department at Ohio’s Kent State University beginning in 1992. While at Kent State, Edgell taught courses in creative writing, fiction writing, and post-colonial literature. In 2009, Edgell received an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of West Indies. That same year she retired from teaching and moved with her husband to St. Louis to be closer to her children and grandchildren until she died in 2020.

The Zee Edgell Papers features not only a deeper look into the author’s professional life but her personal life as well. The collection includes personal letters, postcards, and notes between Edgell and her loved ones; professional correspondence between and her publisher; drafts of her short stories and book chapters; newspaper articles; letters from her global travels with husband Alvin Edgell during his tenure with CARE; documents related to her time serving as director of the Belize Women’s Bureau; and literature on Belizean history. There are also materials related to her time as a faculty member in Kent State’s English Department.

The Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive (BFA) is an archival home for Black women and their allies. Founded by Dr. Irma McClaurin, Black feminist anthropologist, academic administrator, award-winning poet and author, past president of Shaw University and leader in higher education, the BFA seeks to identify Black women from all walks of life who are artists, activists, and academics but may not be well known, and document their wide array of contributions at many levels: community, state, national, and global. In addition to being an ongoing resource for academic and community researchers, the BFA also aims to be a training center, where Black archivists can actively participate in their own history and uplift and protect the endangered legacy of Black women. Articles about Dr. McClaurin and the BFA have appeared in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, UMass Magazine and on the the Black Presence website. Her article, “Black Women, Visible and Heard,” published in UMass Magazine was highlighted when the publication received the Gold level CASE award in 2022.

The BFA is an umbrella collection, made up of a growing and diverse group of collections documenting Black women, allies, movements, and organizations. Highlights include the papers of renown anthropologists Sheila Walker and Carolyn Martin Shaw; Belizean writer Zee Edgell; activist and educator Cheryl Evans, who founded the Black Pioneers Project documenting the experience of Black students at UMass Amherst during the late 1960s; Lawrence (Larry) Paros, a UMass alum and forerunner of the Alternative Education movement in America, past director of the 1968 Yale Summer High School (YSHS); and the papers of Dr. Irma McClaurin, BFA founder, which include her photographs of iconic Black figures. The development of the BFA has been supported by two grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation: The Historical Archive Grant and The Global Initiative Grant (GIG) for “The Black Feminist Archive Pandemic Preservation Project of Black Women Practicing Anthropologists” project

Collections include:

• Zee Edgell Papers
• Cheryl Evans Papers
• Irma McClaurin Collection
• Lawrence Paros Papers
• Carolyn Martin Shaw Papers
• Audrey Smedley Papers
• Sheila Walker Papers
• Mae Upperman Collection

From a childhood spent in a tenement in Norfolk, Va., Carolyn Martin Shaw went on to enjoy a distinguished career as a pioneer in Black Feminist anthropology. Educated in segregated schools, she was an outstanding student, winning scholarship funding to Michigan State University, where she received both her BS (1966) and PhD (1975). Shaw’s dissertation on Kikuyu kinship morality marked several themes that she developed through subsequent research projects in Kenya and Zimbabwe. Based in the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz throughout her career, she was a productive scholar, publishing dozens of articles and chapters, and two important monographs, Colonial Inscriptions: Race, Class and Sex in Kenya (1995) and Women and Power in Zimbabwe: Promises of Feminism (2015), and she filled a variety of administrative posts, including department chair, Provost of the Kresge residential college, and Chair of the UC system-wide Committee on Privilege and Tenure. She has received numerous awards in her career, including a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Zimbabwe in 1983-1984, a Danforth Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and a McHenry Award for Service to the Academic Senate at UCSC. Shaw retired from UCSC in 2010.

Documenting her work in Black feminist anthropology, the Carolyn Martin Shaw collection includes published and unpublished writing, correspondence, and a wealth of information on her research in Kenya and Zimbabwe. Along with her fieldnotes, research data, and photographs, the collection also includes records of her faculty service at USCS, and awards received for teaching and university service.

Born in Detroit in 1930, Audrey Smedley was the oldest daughter of Ulysses and Mattie Smedley. After attending Detroit Public School, Smedley earned a B.A. in the history, letters, and law program (1954) and a M.A. in anthropology with a concentration in history (1957) from the University of Michigan. Smedley pursued her Ph.D. at the University of Manchester (1967) where she investigated the social and economic structure of the Birom in Northern Nigeria. Known for her research into the history of “race,” a concept she argued emerged in the Americas to justify slavery, Smedley published widely on the topic including her award-winning book Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (1993). She began her teaching career at Wayne State University and Oakland University, went on to teach at Binghampton University, retiring in 1995, before becoming a professor of anthropology at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she retired a second time in 2002. Smedley was the co-founder of the Museum of Afro-American History in Detroit and the recipient of numerous awards and honors including a fellow of the American Association of Science and winner of the Delta Award for Excellence in Afro-American History and Anthropology. Smedley died on October 14, 2020, in Beltsville, Maryland at the age of 90.

The Audrey Smedley Papers features an extensive collection of research materials and notes, drafts of articles and books, professional correspondence, and teaching files. Smedley’s filed notes related to her work in Birom are included as are drafts of her award-winning book, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview.

Sheila S. Walker, PhD, cultural anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, has done fieldwork, lectured, and participated in intellectual and cultural events in most of Africa and the Global African Diaspora, and her goal is to educate the public about this diaspora. Her edited book, African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas, resulting from her international conference on “The African Diaspora and the Modern World,” has a companion documentary, Scattered Africa: Faces and Voices of the African Diaspora. Her also edited volume, Conocimiento desde adentro: Los afro-sudamericanos hablan de sus pueblos y sus historias/Conhecimento desde dentro: Os afro-sul-americanos falam de seus povos e suas histórias [Knowledge from the Inside: Afro-South Americans Speak of their People and their Stories] (in Spanish and Portuguese, not yet English), features chapters by Afrodescendants from all the Spanish-speaking countries in South America. She co-produced the documentary, Slave Routes: A Global Vision for the UNESCO Slave Route Project. And her most recent documentary is Familiar Faces/Unexpected Places: A Global African Diaspora, which was shown at the United Nations as the 2018 Black History Month program for the UN International Decade for People of African Descent. It was sent for showings at UN Information Centers in the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Europe. Dr. Walker was a Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for African and African American Studies, and held an endowed chair in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, and was a Distinguished Visiting Professor, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the African Diaspora and the World Program at Spelman College.

The Sheila S. Walker Collection highlights how the life experiences of an African American cultural anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, focusing on the Global African Diaspora and relationships between the Diaspora and Africa and among African Diasporan societies, allude to, exemplify, and elucidate significant issues of her era. It provides archival materials of various sorts that characterize dynamics of the period both nationally and internationally. The Collection reveals information that does not fit the usual narrative, such as that Operation Crossroads Africa, founded by an African American minister, inspired the creation of the United States Peace Corps, a U.S. government institution helmed by a relative of the then president of the nation. Also, U.S. northern, urban African Americans continued to participate in Mutual Aid Societies, as were so important historically, and sometimes presently, in much of Africa and the African Diaspora.

Charmaine Wijeyesinghe, ca. 2023

Charmaine Wijeyesinghe has studied, consulted, and written in the area of social justice education and organizational change for almost 40 years. She earned her bachelor’s in psychology (’80), a master’s in education (’85) and her EdD (’92) from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass), and while a grad student worked as an administrator at UMass, including serving as Staff Associate to the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, Assistant Dean of Students, and Assistant University Ombudsperson. After defending her dissertation she became Dean of Students at Mount Holyoke College, and later turned to career as a consultant. She was National Program Consultant for the National Conference for Community and Justice, where she developed social justice programs and trainings, and is now an independent consultant and author who addresses the areas of organizational development, identity development, and social justice, working primarily with colleges and universities around the country. Her doctoral work on Multiracial adults, completed in 1992, yielded one of the first models of Multiracial identity development which was adopted into the anti-bias curriculum of the Anti Defamation League. Dr. Wijeyesinghe has published articles, book chapters, and edited multiple volumes on Multiracial identity, racial identity and conflict resolution practice, the evolution of social identity models, and intersectionality. Wijeyesinghe received the (inaugural) NCORE Award for Scholarship in 2017 and (with Johnston-Guerrero) the Multiracial Network of ACPA’s Innovation Award in 2021. She was inducted into the ACPA Diamond Honoree Program in 2024.

The Charmaine Wijeyesinghe Papers document two branches of Wijeyesinghe’s scholarly and public engagements in the fields of social identity, Multiracial issues, and the application of intersectionality to higher education. Wijeyesinghe’s work and output related to her doctoral degree and 1992 dissertation, Towards a Theory of Bi-Racial Identity Development: A Review of the Literature on Black Identity Development, White Identity Development, and Bi-Racial Identity Issues, are well documented, including coded transcripts from interviews and Wijeyesinghe’s work log. Wijeyesinghe’s extensive engagement at professional conferences and as a workshop trainer frames the remaining materials, which include training workbooks and presentation agendas, programs, and handouts.