Black women explored their role at the University and in the larger world this weekend as they examined how their race and gender are most powerfully articulated in society.
The University's Black Women's Leadership Conference featured 12 distinguished panelists who addressed a group of about 40 females in the Minor Hall auditorium on Saturday.
The panel of black women scholars, artists, and activists included Jacklyn Monk, managing editor of Vibe magazine; Angela Davis, assistant dean of students and director of Residence Life; English Prof. Lisa Woolfork; English graduate student Kendra Hamilton; and Rev. Brenda Brown-Grooms, a University alumna.
In her keynote address, Monk said she advocates featuring black women and other minorities as writers, on magazine covers and in articles.
Monk served as the first black beauty editor of New Woman, a general audience women's magazine. At Vibe, she transformed the magazine's production from 10 to 12 issues a year. The magazine now has 5.7 million readers, of whom 70 percent are black, 27 percent are white and 13 percent are Latino.
Prominent black women at the University echoed similar stories. Davis, who was one of the first female black professors at the University, said her identity is shaped by the "long line of strong women I come from."
"I don't go around talking about it," Davis said. "I am what I am. I brought that to the University and a sense of myself."
Hamilton, who has taught several courses on black writers at the University, followed a slightly different path from other panelists.
As a child, she attended Ashley Hall, a private girls' school in Charleston, S.C., which was founded in the slaveholding era for the Southern aristocracy. When she attended the school in the 1970s, many of her peers were descendents of former slaveholders.
"I learned to conjugate Latin verbs and play Mona Lisa on the piano, but I couldn't be black. It was a disfiguration - to them, anyway," Hamilton said. "I had to heal from that."
She later worked as a journalist in Houston, where she battled race in a predominantly white male newsroom.
"Here I was in a fairly multicultural city, 50 percent black, and I had to fight for black issues in the paper," she said.
Monk said she hopes the conference can "inspire young women to be fearless - enter into industries that haven't reached out to us. Our influences are needed."
Fourth-year College student Afua Addo, who organized the event with the Women's Center, voiced similar sentiments.
"I wanted to leave a legacy of strong, powerful, smart and diverse women who will work together to maintain a community of sisterhood, a support network within the University realm," she said. "I hope this helps."
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