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U.S. historian teaches with a multi-voice course narrative

Dayo F. Gore

U.S. historian Dayo F. Gore engaged student discussion about African American women's voices in U.S. history.

The New York University Ph.D. candidate taught second session, undergraduate history course "African-American Women's Politics," about political activism and development of black feminist thought, from Emancipation to the present. She'd developed the course while writing her dissertation "A Candle in A Gale Wind: Black Women Radicals and Post-World War II U.S. Politics, 1930-1960."

Gore cited two main goals for her students: to build critical analysis skills around historical subjects, and to begin questioning the "assumptions and exclusions," which often accompany dominant narratives of U.S. history.

She wants students to recognize the multiple voices that shape U.S. history. "You can't really understand history unless you understand, in some ways, all of these different voices," she said.

The class surveyed black women's political organizing and strategizing during significant periods, including the Great Migration, the Great Depression, post-World War II (WWII) 1940s and 1950s, and that of present-day, popular culture.

Having written about the various periods, Gore has narrowed her research focus to black women's political activism during the 1940s and 1950s. Her doctoral work, in history, focuses on the African Diaspora and 20th century U.S. history. But her dissertation will center on black women's voices during the post-WWII, Cold War period.

She said the summer course allowed her to explore black women's voices in U.S. politics on a broader scale than her most recent writing projects. She introduced the concept of "intersectionality," which is central to her work.

Intersectionality describes how overlapping characteristics such as race, gender, sexuality, and class cumulatively affect people's lives. The "intersection" of such characteristics, or identities, often has shaped discrimination directed at African American women throughout U.S. history. According to the syllabus, Gore's summer course studied "the range of politics and theoretical analysis black women activists employed to address interrelated systems of oppression."

Her students held good discussions, she said. "They're really engaged in thinking about the process of history."

Gore just finished a chapter in her dissertation, about black women's civil rights organizing in the 1940s and 1950s. She hoped to write a chapter this summer about how 1930s radicalism shaped a generation of activists, and laid the foundations for social movements in the late 1950s and 1960s.

She'll continue researching the Cold War this year, through a fellowship with the New York University International Center for Advanced Studies (ICAS). She helped kick off the September 2001 "Project on the Cold War as Global Conflict," themed "War and Peace: 1945-2000."

ICAS extends the annual fellowship to scholars from around the globe, to form an "intellectual community." According to its homepage, ICAS sponsors work "that explores the formation of contemporary structures of political power, social life, and cultural expression from perspectives at once local and global," (www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/icas/).

Gore said many scholars are researching the 1940s and 1950s Cold War period nowadays, and she enjoys the scholarly company. "There's a community of people to talk to."

Her interest in black women's voices throughout the post-WWII period grew from her long-time desire to understand black women's experiences in the United States, she said.

"When I say 'African American women's history', it brings me into all these different spaces."

She started out as a Progressive Era intellectual historian, she said, earning her B.A. with Honors in history, from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She looked into the ways African Americans made use of the Progressive Era to further their own struggles for equality. She then studied "shifting constructions of gender and race in the 1920s, through the study of black women artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance."

All the while, she was driven by her interest in intersectionality. She earned her master's degree in history from New York University in May 1999.

"I don't know how I ended up in the '40s and '50s somehow," she said. "I think I was just looking for a relatively unexplored moment."

Gore hopes to finish her dissertation and doctoral degree in spring 2002. She wants to go on to teach U.S. history at the college level, and to publish her dissertation as a book. In the future, she said, she'd like to teach history courses that combine her various intellectual interests.

She also foresees a research and writing project on intersectionality in women's sports. She joked that she'd do the sports project just so she could watch tennis.

A tennis and basketball fan, Gore hoped to play for fun in Bloomington. She said she enjoyed biking to and from her on-campus apartment - downhill on the way to work.

Having been in New York City for five years, she said, she really appreciated Bloomington's many trees. "I try to sit outside a little each day."

- Written by Regina Galer