Gerald McWorter, professor emeritus of African American studies and information science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has donated a collection of his personal papers to the University of Illinois Archives. The donation includes 60-years-worth of materials, including Dr. McWorter’s family history, scholarly work on Black studies, as well as records of his experience during the civil rights movement.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. McWorter – also known as Abdul Alkalimat – was an active member of the civil rights movement. The archival donation includes information from this time in his life, including pamphlets, posters, political materials, and newspapers. The collection also includes family and personal papers dating back to his ancestor, “Free Frank” McWorter, who freed himself and 15 other family members from slavery in 1836 and founded the integrated Illinois town of New Philadelphia.
Dr. McWorter focuses his scholarship on digital inequality, community informatics, and African American intellectual history. In addition to the University of Illinois, he has taught Black studies at several universities, including Fisk University in Nashville, Northeastern University in Boston, and the University of Toledo in Ohio. His recent donation includes papers from throughout his academic career, including 50 boxes of documents and materials relating to the field of Black studies – information he leveraged when writing his 2021 book, The History of Black Studies (Pluto Press).
Dr. McWorter received his bachelor’s degree in sociology and psychology from Ottawa University in Kansas. He holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago.
