The Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University has announced that its archive of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference/Women’s Organizational Movement for Equality Now (W.O.M.E.N.) is now open for study by scholars.
SCLC/W.O.M.E.N. was founded in 1979 to focus on programs relating to family values, education, wellness, and human development and to encourage women to become more involved in leadership posts in the SCLC. The organization split off from the SCLC in 1989.
The archives include administrative files, correspondence, memos, reports, fliers, posts, minutes of meetings, brochures, and photographs during the 1979-2013 period.
Carol Anderson, professor of African American studies at Emory University, stated that “this collection will add immeasurably to the growing body of research on the role of women in the struggle for equality. We are beginning to get a handle on the contributions of and challenges for women during the traditional era of the civil rights movement. How the women of the SCLC/W.O.M.E.N. identified, then mobilized, strategized and organized to take on the HIV/AIDS crisis that engulfed the Black community, the injustices of the criminal justice system, and more is now open and ready for scholars to explore.”
Professor Anderson holds bachelor’s and master’s degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She earned a Ph.D. in history from Ohio State University. She joined the faculty at Emory in 2009 after teaching at the University of Missouri. Her latest book is Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
