Hine, Darlene Clark

Impact on the world

Hine's path into Black women's history began almost by accident in 1980, when the president of the Indiana chapter of the National Council of Negro Women tracked her down as the only Black woman historian in the state and asked her to document the history of Black women there; the resulting research launched a career dedicated to ensuring that Black women were not erased from the historical record. Her books, including Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950 and the co-authored survey A Shining Thread of Hope, traced Black women's experience from indentured servitude through the civil rights era, while her landmark three-volume Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, first published in 1993 and expanded with more than 325 biographical entries in its second edition, became the standard reference work in the field. As the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University, Hine established the university's Comparative Black History Ph.D. program in 1987 and personally mentored more than twenty doctoral students, and she went on to serve as president of both the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association; President Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal in 2014, and the Organization of American Historians created the Darlene Clark Hine Award in 2010 to honor the best new book in African American women's and gender history.

Life & background

Born February 7, 1947, in Morley, Missouri, the oldest of four children of a truck driver, Hine earned her B.A. from Roosevelt University in 1968 and her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Kent State University by 1975. She taught at South Carolina State College, Purdue University, and Michigan State University, where she held the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professorship, before joining Northwestern University's faculty in 2004 as Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies and History, a position she continues to hold as professor emerita.

Sources

1. National Endowment for the Humanities; Michigan State University Department of History; Northwestern University Department of Black Studies