By Emily Finnila ’27
Contributing Writer
Two months ago, renowned historian Dr. Deborah Gray White came and spoke to the Mount Holyoke College community on February 4 and 5. Dr. White’s focus as a historian is on Black women in U.S. history, and she is a pioneer of her field. Her debut book “Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South” — published in 1985 — was one of the first history books to focus on the lives of Black women in the United States. Its publication led the Library of Congress to create a new subject category in its system in 1985, “Women Slaves” a category that, until then, had never existed. Some of the other work Dr. White is best known for is “Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994” and “Let My People Go, African Americans 1804-1860.”
Dr. White gave two talks at the College. The first was a roundtable discussion on Feb. 4 in the Archives, located in the basement of Dwight Hall. Students got to explore the world of archival research by hearing about Dr. White’s career path as an historian and her stories of navigating different archives. She talked about everything from her enjoyment of investigating an archive, to the importance of bringing allergy medicine with you in case you become allergic to what you’re researching.
Dr. White’s second talk, on Feb. 5 in Gamble Auditorium, was Mount Holyoke College’s keynote speech for Black History Month. In her keynote, Dr. White shared her own family’s history, exploring personal archives, the importance of oral tradition in telling Black history, and the complexities of familial memory. The talk she gave was a preview of her upcoming autobiography, tentatively called "Winning Against Ugly: A Black Historian's Tale of Love, Loss, and the Historical Profession."
When asked about her main takeaways from hearing Dr. White’s talk, Maddy Broussard ’26 said, “Where institutional knowledge fails, autobiography expands Black women’s histories. Memory allows us to lift their lives from a line in the census.”
Maxine Ahenkora ’27 appreciated “how Dr. Deborah Gray White seeks to rescue Black women from invisibility and obscurity within archives that seek to erase their lived experiences and stories of resistance.”
Mount Holyoke News held an email interview with Assistant Professor of Gender Studies, Sarah Stefana Smith, who attended Dr. White’s speech in Gamble and also co-facilitated a round-table discussion with Dr. White at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on February 6th.
On Dr. White’s keynote speech at the College, Smith said, “The larger takeaway from White's visit is the importance of negotiating historical documents with care and attentiveness — work that requires multiple methodological tools. In this sense, the talk itself enacts a practice of historical re/memory that will sit with me for some time, by fleshing out what it means to tell the truth of a family's story through personal recollection, family recounting, and some institutional documents.”
The release date of Dr. White’s upcoming autobiography is yet to be announced, but readers, future archivists, and historians should keep an eye out for it on bookshelves, as it is sure to be a read that teaches us a lot about navigating and telling the stories of an archive.
Whitney White ’28 contributed fact-checking.