15 September
The University of Iowa had long admitted African Americans as students. It was one of the first public institutions of higher education to admit black students. Not until after the passage of the landmark civil rights acts of the 1960s, however, was there any movement to offer courses on African-American History. “There had never been a black historian or instruction in African-American history,” writes Stow Persons:
“Because of the department’s longstanding practice of appointing the best available candidates the coming of affirmative action policies appeared to present a conflict with the need for women and minority appointees. The matter was earnestly discussed in departmental meetings. Fortunately, this proved to be more a matter of theory than of practice. Women and minority members had been preparing for careers as historians in sufficient numbers so that when the department was confronted with the requirement to conform to affirmative action criteria it was able to appoint individuals who were eminently qualified in terms of the department’s most rigorous expectations.”
In spring 1968, the UIowa Faculty Senate passed a resolution in support of the Human Rights Committee to make an “integrated program of Black Studies the highest priority in the University” [See “Alan Spitzer to Dean Williard Boyd, March 17, 1969”]. The Committee also recommended the establishment of an Afro-American Cultural Center, which opened in October 1968 at a house at the corner of North Capitol and Market streets. In March 1969, the Department of History requested a permanent appointment in “Afro-American History.” In the meantime, during the summer sessions of 1969 and 1970, the department “employed an expert in Afro-American history” in conjunction with other Black Studies summer programs (see syllabus cover above).
Finally, in 1971, the UI History Department hired its first African-American faculty member, Wilson Moses, who joined as an instructor. Moses advanced to assistant professor in 1975, after receiving his Ph.D. from Brown University, but departed the next year for Southern Methodist University. Although he did not have a very long career at the university, he stated in an email conversation, “my years at U of Iowa were happy ones.” Moses is currently the Ferree Professor of American History at the Pennsylvania State University. After Moses’ departure, the department hired Jonathan Walton, who spent more than eleven years at the University of Iowa, from 1977 to 1988. Walton was a talented and promising scholar and a beloved teachers and colleague who was taken away suddenly from an illness in 1988 (see Walton’s entry in “Featured Faculty”).
The department’s record of hiring and retaining African-American scholars has been spotty. After Walton’s death, History did not successfully hire an African-American faculty member again until 2012, when Stephanie Jones-Rogers joined the department. Two years later, Jones-Rogers left Iowa for a position at UC-Berkeley. In 2015, Keisha Blain came to UI as an assistant professor briefly before departing two years later to the University of Pittsburgh. In 2018, the department hired two assistant professors in African-American history, Simon Balto and Ashley Howard. Balto departed in 2020 for a chaired position at UW-Madison, while Howard has continued with the department as one of its most popular teachers and promising scholars.
Despite the department’s struggles to hire and retain African-American faculty, African-American and African history have become research strengths in the department and a major part of the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. In 1986, African historian James Giblin joined the department. A renowned specialist in Tanzania and East Africa, Giblin advised and trained many PhD students from Africa. In 1992, Leslie Schwalm joined the department as its historian of American slavery and the Civil War. Jointly appointed with the Department of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, Schwalm is a leading scholar of African-American women’s experiences during slavery, Civil War, and emancipation. She also advised numerous African-American PhD students who found successful careers as academic historians. Schwalm, who retired in 2022, also is one of the founders of the Iowa Satellite of the national Colored Conventions Project. Along with librarians, archivists, faculty, graduate and undergraduate students across the state of Iowa, she has helped to recuperate, interpret, and make visible the civil rights activism African American women and men in Iowa in the eight conventions they organized between 1857-1895.