Lauren Kientz Anderson
My blogs
| Gender | Female |
|---|---|
| Industry | Education |
| Occupation | Visiting Professor |
| Location | Decorah, IA, United States |
| Introduction | I successfully defended my dissertation in the History Department at Michigan State University April 30, 2010. My dissertation is a work in African American Intellectual history. I study a group of African American intellectuals and activists whom W. E. B. Du Bois identified as the best black minds of the 1930s. These men and women critiqued the NAACP for its failure to connect with the African American "masses" at the Second Amenia Conference They created a network of friends and colleagues that sustained them through the next decades of their professions and activism. I explore and challenge the dichotomies between detached intellectual and committed activist, between economic- and race-based activism, and between activist and accommodationist. I also explore the differences between men’s and women’s plans to improve the status of African Americans in the nation. In this exploration, I have found several important but almost unstudied African American women leaders whose work in black colleges, the YWCA, the League of Nations, and the New Deal change our perceptions of Depression-era black leadership. |