Drusilla Dunjee Houston Memorial Scholarship Award
The Association of Black Women Historians’ 2016 Drusilla Dunjee Houston Memorial Scholarship Award recognizes an emerging female scholar of African descent. It fosters scholarly research in Africana Women’s history. Each year an award will be given for the best, unpublished original essay from either a graduate course or a chapter from a thesis or dissertation for the 2016 award year (June 1, 2015 to May 30, 2016). The essay must be wholly focused on some aspect of history on black women from the U.S. and/or Africana Diaspora. The paper must involve interpretation of primary sources, focus on the ideas or actions initiated among black women, and make a significant contribution to Africana women’s history. The Black Classic Press of Baltimore inaugurated the award two decades ago, and it has been continued through the contributions of ABWH members.
Requirements
- Black female graduate student currently pursuing a master of arts or doctorate degree in history or a related field
- A minimum 3.0 GPA; applicant must submit a transcript
- History writing sample that demonstrates analysis and use of primary sources
- Two letters of recommendation from professors and academic advisors on letterhead (Note that one of the letters must come from an ABWH member. The letters may be submitted directly to Award committee.)
- Curriculum Vita
The deadline for receipt of all application materials (including letters of recommendation) is June 30, 2016. Please send application materials to drusilladunjeeaward@gmail.com.
The 2016 award will be presented at the 2016 ABWH Annual Luncheon on during the 101st ASALH Convention in Richmond, Virginia.
Drusilla Dunjee Houston (1876-1941)
Drusilla Dunjee was born on January 20, 1876, in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. Like many African American women writers swallowed up and languishing in the historical gap, Houston is one of the most prolific and all but forgotten African American women writers of the 20th century. She ws considered a “historian without portfolio” and dismissed as a serious historian and writer by leading Black male historians such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Alaine Locke, Carter G. Woodson, and others. Houston burst on the historical literary scene in 1926 with Volume I of her magnum opus Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire Book 1: Nations of the Cushite Empire, Marvelous Facts from Authentic Records, thought to represent the crowning achievement of Houston’s literary life. With this work, Houston is remembered as the earliest known and possibly the only African American woman to write a multi-volume study of ancient Africa where she boldly proclaimed in 1926, an African origin of civilization and culture during one of the most turbulent periods for black Americans in American history.
Aside from her writings on ancient African history and later American history, Dunjee Houston was a multi-faceted figure, who, at one time or another during her wide-ranging career was an educator, elegist, racial uplift theorist, institution builder and journalist. Her writings cross multiple literary periods.
A search for Houston over decades reveals an extraordinarily private woman who felt compelled to thrust herself into the major social and political dialogues of her era, especially the racial uplift work of the federated women’s clubs. When she began writing, it was clear that Houston was eager to first take her readers “Mountain Stepping,” and then “moleing and mining” in the old dusty books that presented what she believed to be the true history of ancient Africa. She educated hundreds of students throughout her life but was one of her own best students as she was the consummate self-taught student fluent in French, German, Greek, and Latin. These skills are especially evident in other writings, particularly her screen play, “The Maddened Mob,” written in elegiac verse in 1915 as a refutation of Birth of a Nation. Arguably, Houston was the very first African American to write a blow-by-blow refutation of Birth of a Nation, which she hoped to become a “flashing photo play.”
Houston was always fearful that her works would be lost and forgotten and that they would never reach the audience she desired, namely the children. To some extent she was correct. On February 11, 1941, Houston died in Arizona after many years of illness from tuberculosis. True to her deep faith, her grave marker reads: “To Die is to Gain.”
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http://www.abwh.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=97&Itemid=159