Professor Gwen Hall, our teacher, friend and mentor turns 91 today, still active and blessed. We rejoice in the naming of the Dept of History and the Hall hosting the Dept. in her honor and name. We are delighted. From one great book to another great essay, her long career has been exemplary.
Born June 27, 1929 in the Deep South City of New Orleans, Louisiana, daughter of Ethel and Herman L. Midlo, a civil rights and labor attorney. Her parents were of Russian- and Polish-Jewish ancestry. Influenced by her father's activism she helped found the only inter-racial youth movement in the U.S South fighting for racial equality in 1945 when she was 16 years old: an interracial, direct-action community group which encouraged and helped African-American voter registration and defied racial segregation laws, opposed lynching and racist politics. In 1965, while teaching black students at Elizabeth City State College in North Carolina, she encouraged them to organize very effective armed resistance to the Ku Klux Klan. After years of political activism, marriage and motherhood she completed some of her academic studies in France and Mexico, giving her broader insight as she acquired fluency in French and Spanish and could use archives in other countries. An even greater pioneer in scholarship, she spent 15 years (1984-1999) creating the first original digital database in which she entered over 104,000 descriptions of slaves from documents in Louisiana (1719-1820) which no one believed existed. This granular multidisciplinary study from below became an international media sensation attracting growing interest from scholars and genealogist and her ongoing work to internationalize it. All of her original books and many articles, especially her multi-prize winning Africans in Colonial Louisiana radicalized thought in several disciplines and changed the way we view and define history, culture and linguistics to more universal patterns.
Publications
Completed and under revision, my memoir, "One person can make a difference. 80 years fighting for Racial and Gender Equality.". 400 manuscript pp. plus many illustrations.
Escravidão e etnias africanas nas Américas: Restaurando os elos. Editora Vozes Limitados, November 2017, 360 pps. Portugese translation of
Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links.
Editor, A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle: The Life of Harry Haywood. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005; Paperback edition 2007.
Editor, Love, War, and the 96th Engineers (colored): The New Guinea Diaries of Captain Hyman Samuelson During World War II. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Africans in Colonial Louisiana: the Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century.Baton Rouge: L.S.U Press, 1992; paperback edition, 1995. This book received nine prizes, including The John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, The Elliott Rudwick Award of the Organization of American Historians, The Willie Lee Rose Prize of the Southern Association of Women Historians, The Immigration History Society's Theodore Saloutas Award, Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the United States, and the American Association for State and Local History Certificate of Commendation.
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