UC Researchers Contribute to Nation s Largest Resource on African-Americans

UC researchers are among the hundreds of scholars from around the nation who contributed to the newly published African American National Biography (AANB).The eight-volume AANB is called the most comprehensive resource dedicated to the contributions of African-Americans to American history and culture. A copy of the AANB, a resource for the nation’s students, librarians, scholars and journalists, is now at UC’s Langsam Library.

The Feb. 18 issue of “Newsweek” reports that the AANB “blows the dust off Black History Month by telling the stories of 4,080 black lives in America – past and present, famous and obscure.”

Fritz Casey-Leininger, a visiting professor in the UC Department of History, Kevin Grace, university archivist and head of the University of Cincinnati Archives & Rare Books Library, Theresa Leininger-Miller, associate professor for the School of Art and Thabiti Asukile, assistant professor of African-American Studies, all contributed articles to the history.

Casey-Leininger contributed a biography (volume one, pages 384-385) of UC alumnus, former Cincinnati mayor and longtime city councilmember Theodore Berry, who became Cincinnati’s first African-American mayor in 1972. Berry earned his BA from UC in 1928 and graduated from the UC College of Law in 1931. He served as mayor of Cincinnati through 1975. Berry was a longtime Civil Rights activist and served on the boards of the NAACP at the local, state and national level. Casey-Leininger says much of the research for the history was drawn from the UC Archives and Rare Books Library’s Theodore M. Berry Collection.

The publication highlights at least four additional individuals with ties to UC, including

• Charles Henry Turner, the first African-American to earn a graduate degree at UC when he earned his master’s degree in biology in 1892
• Charles Henry Turner’s grandson, Darwin Turner, who became UC’s youngest baccalaureate graduate in 1947 when he earned his bachelor’s degree in English at age 16
• UC basketball icon Oscar Robertson
• UC alumnus and Olympian Ted Corbitt, known as “the Father of American Ultrarunning”

Asukile, who teaches African-American and Diaspora history, contributed a biography (volume 6, pages 673-675) about journalist and historian Joel Augustus Rogers (1880-1966), a photo-anthropologist who is considered the one of the early pioneers of African, African-American and Diaspora history.

“During his lifetime, Rogers did more to popularize African, African-American, and African Diaspora history than any other American scholar in the twentieth century,” states the biography. “Rogers spent most of his life after 1915 researching and writing about history and race issues in order to debunk the pseudo-scientific, racist anthropological and historical scholarship of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Rogers believed anti-Negro literature of the early 20th century seriously distorted the image of African-Americans among most whites and created an inferiority complex among many blacks. Hence, Rogers dedicated his life to proving that people of African descent were equal to whites and had a vibrant history and culture,” Asukile states in the biography.

Leininger-Miller says she contributed 10 articles to the history, including an article about James Presley (J.P.) Ball, a daguerreotypist, photographer and entrepreneur who opened his first successful studio in Cincinnati in 1851, according to Leininger-Miller's report.
 
Grace, who has authored several sports histories, including Cincinnati Boxing, contributed an article about boxing trainer, manager and sports commentator Emanuel Steward.

Growing up in Appalachia and Detroit and learning boxing as a pre-teen, Steward first gained wide attention as a trainer in 1971 when his protégés captured seven championships in the Detroit Gold Gloves competition. Grace says Steward began training professional boxers in 1977, but still served as an example to inner-city youth in Detroit, emphasizing life skills and education.

Under Steward’s guidance, Grace says Hilmer Kenty won the World Boxing Association lightweight title in 1977, becoming the first in a long line of Steward-trained world champions. He guided six gold-medal winners in the 1984 Olympics and in 2002 was named National Director of Coaching for USA Boxing, the governing body of American Olympic Boxing.

The AANB, a publication of Oxford University Press, was edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and editor-in-chief of the Oxford African-American Studies Center, and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University.