Contact Information
Biography Information
Darlene Clark Hine is Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University (2004-). She was John A. Hannah Professor of History at Michigan State University (1987-2004). She has taught at Purdue University (1974-1987), and at South Carolina State University (1972-1974). She is a graduate of Roosevelt University (1968, Chicago, IL) and earned her PhD at Kent State University (1975). Hine is the author of Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the Democratic White Primary in Texas (1979, rev. 2005, University of Missouri Press); and Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950 (Indiana University Press, 1989). She is co-editor (with Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Elsa Barkley Brown) of Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia ( 2 vols.1994), and editor of Black Women in America (3 vols, Oxford University Press, 2005). She is co-editor with Trica Daniele Keaton and Stephen Smalls of Black Europe and the African Diaspora (2009). Hine is past-president of The Organization of American Historians, and of The Southern Historical Association. She is a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006). Hine has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center, The Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, and at the Radcliffe Institute.
Project Description
During her stay at the Du Bois Institute Hine will revise for publication her Huggins Lectures; Rehearsal for Freedom: Black Women Health Professionals in South Carolina before Brown. This micro-history focuses on the lives and careers of four pioneer South Carolina women physicians and nurses during the era of Jim Crow. The two women physicians were the first to be licensed and to establish medical practices in the state: Drs. Lucy Hughes Brown and Matilda A. Evans, both were graduates of the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia (1894 and 1897 respectively). Both founded hospitals and nursing training schools (in Charleston and Columbia, SC, respectively). The two nursing professionals were Anna DeCosta Banks, (Charleston), and nurse-midwife Maude Callen (Pineville). Over the course of five decades (beginning with the USSC 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson) these women (sequentially) provided medical and nursing care for thousands of African American citizens as they simultaneously advanced the conviction that health care was as much a citizenship right as was education. During a period characterized by racial segregation, political disfranchisement, economic oppression, and rampant violence, these women (and their allies) devised and practiced an array of strategies to establish and sustain institutions that facilitated the survival of those who would become the foot soldiers and leaders of the modern Freedom Movement. While this study details the work of four South Carolina black women health professionals, it suggests that there existed similar professional counterparts in each southern state. More research and analysis of black women health professionals is imperative if we are fully to deepen our understanding of the gendered nature of black activism in local communities, the importance of interracial alliances, and to decipher the carefully choreographed class politics of responsibility in the first half of the 20th century.