Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (born 27 June 1929) is a prominent historian and public intellectual who focuses on the history of slavery in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Louisiana (United States), and the African Diaspora in the Americas. Discovering a cache of extensive European colonial records in Louisiana, she created a database of records of descriptions of over 100,000 enslaved Africans. It has become a prominent resource for historical and genealogical research of African Americans. In addition to earning recognition in academia, Hall has been featured in the New York Times, People Magazine, ABC News, and other popular outlets for her contributions to scholarship, genealogy, and the critical reevaluation of the history of slavery.

Midlo Hall is an award-winning author and Professor Emerita of Latin American and Caribbean History, Rutgers University, New Jersey. She is also an International Advisory Board Member of the Harriet Tubman Resource Institute for the Study of Global Migrations of African Peoples, York University, Toronto, Canada. She now (2010) teaches Africans in the Atlantic world at Michigan State University as Adjunct Professor of history.

Her work Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992) traced to original cultures the various ethnic African origins of enslaved Africans. She changed the way in which several related disciplines are researched and taught in the United States. She traced Africans to specific cultures of the continent, and added to scholarly understanding of the multicultural and diverse origins of American culture. She was able to demonstrate distinct patterns of settlement and re-Africanization of Louisiana, resulting in its unique culture in the American South.

Biography

Early life and education

Gwendolyn Midlo was born 27 June 1929 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of Ethel and Herman Lazard Midlo, a civil rights and labor attorney. Her parents were of Russian- and Polish-Jewish ancestry. She was influenced by her father's activism. In 1990 her mother founded the Ethel and Herman Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans, where her father had donated his papers and archives before his death in 1978.

Midlo has had a career marked by early political activism as well as academic scholarship. After World War II, at age 16 in 1945, Hall helped organize and participated in the New Orleans Youth Council, an interracial, direct-action community organization which encouraged and helped African-American voter registration and defied racial segregation laws. In 1946 she was elected to the Executive Board of the Southern Negro Youth Congress at the Southern Youth Legislature in Columbia, South Carolina. It had operated since 1937 to end lynching, racial discrimination and segregation, and to achieve voting rights for all.

Midlo helped organize Young Progressives, an interracial youth and student movement in segregated New Orleans that included students from Tulane University, Newcomb College, and Loyola University (white colleges) and from Dillard and Xavier universities (historically black colleges.) She was active in the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate. She organized in New Orleans, rural Louisiana, and in Atlanta, Georgia. She also was active in the Civil Rights Congress and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.

Starting at Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University, Midlo studied history. After years of political activism and marriage, Midlo Hall completed some of her academic studies outside the United States, which gave her broader insight as she acquired fluency in French and Spanish. She earned a B.A. in history at Mexico City College, 1962; followed by her master's in Latin American History, also at Mexico City College in 1963-64.

While a doctoral graduate student at the University of Michigan, Midlo Hall published an article advocating medical treatment for heroin addicts: "Mechanisms for Exploiting the Black Community", The Negro Digest, November 1969. It inspired demonstrations in the streets of Detroit. She organized methadone-maintenance treatment programs in both Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Adoption of such treatment by major cities helped reduce heroin use and the crime rate in the inner city of Detroit and others. Midlo Hall earned a Ph.D. in Latin American History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1970.

Academic career

Midlo Hall and Haywood moved to Mexico City, Mexico in early 1959, shortly before Haywood was expelled from the Communist Party over ideological differences. There Midlo Hall completed her B.A. and master's degree, before returning to the US in 1964. In 1966 she started her graduate studies to earn her doctorate at the University of Michigan. She raised their children by herself after 1964.

In 1965, while teaching black students at Elizabeth City State College in North Carolina, Midlo Hall encouraged them to organize armed resistance against the Ku Klux Klan and to oppose the United States military intervention in Vietnam. She chaired the Defense Committee for civil rights leader http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/emailAlbum?uname=ghall1929&aid=5307644475055127297 Robert F. Williams when he was extradited from Michigan to Monroe, North Carolina in 1975. During the 1960s and early 1970s, she published a number of influential essays in African-American magazines. Midlo Hall was fired and blacklisted in 1965 by Elizabeth City State College and the F.B.I. for her activities.^{[citation needed]}

When she moved to Michigan, she worked in Detroit during 1965 and 1966, often with Grace Lee Boggs, as a temporary legal secretary, keeping one step ahead of the F.B.I.'s trying to get them fired.^{[citation needed]} The F.B.I. engineered the eviction of Midlo Hall and her two young children from three apartments which she rented in Michigan during her first year: two in Detroit and one in Ann Arbor. She managed to persist in completing coursework and her Ph.D. dissertation for her doctorate, which was published as a book by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1971.

After completing her doctorate, Midlo Hall started as an assistant professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she advanced to full professor in 1993. She has taught Caribbean and Latin American history, as well as classes on the African diaspora. Publication in 1992 of Africans in Colonial Louisiana supported a reevaluation of African-American contributions to Louisiana and United States culture. She discovered significant colonial data in courthouses in Louisiana, and made use of national and state archives in France, Spain and Texas. Finding that French and Spanish records had more details about the origins of slaves than did those of the British and Americans, she developed important material on Africans in Louisiana, as well as linking them to their home cultures on the African continent.

She worked for 15 years, five years with research assistants, to develop a searchable database on the 100,000 slaves described in documents. These included Africans transported to Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries. The material was published on a CD in 2000 and online in 2001. The database includes such details as African slave names, gender, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slaves' testimony and emancipations.

While an influential academic work, her history Africans in Colonial Louisiana has also become popular among jazz musicians in New Orleans. It remains popular among Afro-Americans and many whites in Louisiana and elsewhere, who refer to it as the "purple book". It is an important starting point for people wanting to learn more about African-American culture in Louisiana.

Midlo Hall is Professor Emerita of Rutgers. She is working on two books: a memoir White Girl in the Middle: My first 80 Years; and a study Diversity, Race Mixture, Slavery, and Freedom: Louisiana 1699-1820; a well as the Western Hemisphere Slave Database.

Midlo Hall's work has been distinguished by her use of original language archives in France and Spain, as well as of records in Latin America, providing a broad base for comparison of slavery in different societies. She has published internationally in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and lectured internationally in English, French and Spanish.

In the mid-1960s, Haywood worked in Harlem, New York with Jesse Gray, later elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He also worked with James Haughton and Josh Lawrence, leaders of the Harlem Tenants' Union and Harlem Fight Back during 1964 and 1965.^{[citation needed]} He moved to Oakland, California, in 1966, then to Detroit, Michigan, with the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.^{[citation needed]} Haywood then returned to Mexico. In 1970 he returned permanently to the United States at the invitation of Howard W. Dodson, then Director of the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta, Georgia.^{[citation needed]}

Collected papers

The Gwendolyn Midlo Hall papers (1939–1991) are housed at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan () and later ones associated with her work on Africans in Louisiana at the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana. (See Amistad Research Center [1].)

The Harry Haywood papers are housed at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Division; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

Published Books and Databases

• Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971)
• Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1992) (This won nine book prizes, including the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association.)
• Love, War, and the 96th Engineers (Colored): The New Guinea Diaries of Captain Hyman Samuelson During World War II (editor; University of Illinois Press, 1995)
• Louisiana Slave Database and Louisiana Free Database 1819-1820, in Hall, Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, Compact Disk Publication (Louisiana State University Press, 2000) and web portal http://www.ibiblio.org/laslave (2001); and
• Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)

Legacy and honors (selected)

• National Endowment for the Humanities "We the People Fellowship" 2006-07.
• Distinguished Service Award, Organization of American Historians (2004);
• Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, elected by the National Assembly of France (1997);
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1996; and
• National Endowment for the Humanities contract, 1991-1996.

Marriage and family

Midlo was married before 1951. Her oldest son Leonid Avram Yuspeh was born in Paris, France in 1951 from this marriage.

After divorce, she next married Harry Haywood in 1956. He was a political activist, member of the Communist Party, USA, and theoretician of self-determination for the African-American nation of the Deep South. She changed her name at marriage to conform to his legal birth name of Haywood Hall. They were married until his death in 1985.

Two children were born from this marriage: Dr. Haywood Hall (b. 1956 in Brooklyn, NY), an emergency physician working in Latin America to develop emergency care [2] and medical Spanish [3] cultural literacy. Dr. Rebecca Hall (b. 1963 in Mexico City) is an attorney and holds a Ph.D. in history.

Between 1953 and 1964, Midlo Hall collaborated with Haywood in freelance writing about theoretical aspects of the civil rights and black protest movement in the United States. Some of these articles were a joint publication in several issues of Soulbook Magazine, which began publication in Berkeley, California in 1964.

External links

• Louisiana Slave Database, available free of charge for download, together with search engine

Further reading

• Wold, "Courthouse Records Reveal Trove of Data About Slavery", The Advocate, Feb. 18, 2001
• Erin Hayes, "Rescuing Louisiana Pasts: Research Yields Treasure Trove of Data on Slaves", ABC News, July 30, 2000
• David Firestone, "Identity Restored to 100,000 Louisiana Slaves", The New York Times
• Jeffrey Ghannam, "Repairing the Past", American Bar Association Journal, November 2000
• "Southern Negro Youth Congress (1937-1949)", BlackPast.org
• Ned Sublette, "Interview with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall", Afropop Worldwide, 2005

• Rediscovering America: Thirty-Five Years of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Report to Congress pursuant to PL 101-152. ISBN 0-942310-02-0, p. 19.

• Congressional Record, Proceedings and Debates of the 109th Congress, Second Session, May 10, 2006. House of Representatives, Hon. Major R Owens of New York. "RECOGNIZING THE SHARED HISTORY OF SLAVERY OF FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES". http://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox/11f0709f9be6056a

Midlo Hall Civil Rights-Era articles

• "Negro Slaves in the Americas", Freedomways, Vol. 4, No. 3, Summer 1964, pp. 296–327.
• "Detroit's Moment of Truth", Freedomways, Vol. 7, No. 1, Fall 1967.
• "St. Malcolm and the Black Revolutionist", Negro Digest, November 1967.
• "Black Resistance in Colonial Haiti", Negro Digest, February 1968.
• "Race and Class in Brazil", Freedomways, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter, 1968).
• "The Myth of Benevolent Spanish Slave Laws", Negro Digest, March 1969.
• "Africans in the Americas", Negro Digest, March 1969.
• "Rural, Black College", Negro Digest, March 1969.
• "Junkie Myths", The Black Liberator, July 1969.
• "Mechanisms for Exploiting the Black Community", Parts 1 and 2, Negro Digest, October and November 1969.
• "What Toussaint L'Ouverture Can Teach Us", Black World, February 1972.