PUBLICATIONS
BOOKS
Feb. 2008 Reading, Writing, and Segregation: A Century of Black Women Teachers in Nashville, Tennessee, (Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press)
ARTICLES
May 2012 “Caring is Activism: Black Southern Womanist Teachers Theorizing and the Careers of Kathleen Crosby and Bertha Maxwell Roddey, 1946–1986,” Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, 48, no. 3: 244-265.
Winter 2005 “We Are Ready [to Desegregate] Whenever They Are: African American Teachers and the Desegregation of the Public Schools in Nashville, Tennessee, 1954-1966,” Journal of African American History, 90, nos. 1-2: 29-51.
NON-REFEREED ARTICLES
Feb. 2017 “The Troubled History of African American Education After the Brown Decision,” The American Historian published by the Organization of American Historians.
BOOK CHAPTERS
July 2013 “The Destiny of Our Race Lies Largely in Their Hands:’ African American Women Teachers’ Efforts during the Progressive Era in Memphis and Nashville,” Chapter in Their Work in the Public Sphere: Tennessee’s New Women in the New South During the Progressive Era, Mary Evins, editor, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee).
Dec. 2011 “Of Culture and Conviction: African American Women Non-Fiction Writers and the Gendered Definition of Class,” The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century, Jennifer Green and Jonathan Daniel Wells, editors, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press).
RESEARCH INTERESTS
African American Gender History, History of Education, Oral History, Women’s and Gender Studies, Southern History, History of The United States Since 1865
COURSES TAUGHT
- HIST 3000 A02, The African American Entrepreneurial Spirit
- HIST 2162 African American Women’s History to 1865
- HIST 2163 African American Women’s History Since 1865
- HIST 3000 A01, History of Education in the US
- HIST 4600 History of US Social Movements
- HIST 6000 US History Graduate Colloquium Since 1865
- HIST 1161 US History Since 1877
- LBST 2101 Western History and Culture
- WGST 4160/5160 Race, Sexuality, and the Body
BIOGRAPHY
Sonya Ramsey grew up in Nashville, Tennessee and attended Howard University where she received a B.A. in Journalism and received her Master’s and Ph.D. in United States History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An Associate Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies, Dr. Ramsey currently serves as Director of the Graduate Certificate Program and will become the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte July 2021. Dr. Ramsey is the author of several historical works including, Reading, Writing, and Segregation: a Century of Black Women Teachers in Nashville, published by the University of Illinois Press (2008) and a book chapter entitled, “The Destiny of Our Race Lies Largely in Their Hands:’ African American Women Teachers’ Efforts during the Progressive Era in Memphis and Nashville,” in the edited volume, Their Work in the Public Sphere: Tennessee’s New Women in the New South During the Progressive Era, Mary Evins, editor, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press), 2013. Her manuscript, After the Marches, Bertha Maxwell-Roddey, a Modern-Day Race Woman in the Desegregated South is under advanced contract and has been submitted for final review with the University Press of Florida.
EDUCATION
Ph.D. United States History – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000.
CURRENT PROJECTS
BOOK IN PROGRESS
After the Marches: Bertha Maxwell-Roddey, a Modern-Day Race Woman in the Desegregated South, a political biography of Charlotte educational activist Bertha Maxwell-Roddey (b. 1930), modernizes the term ‘Race Woman’ to describe how she and her peers turned hard-won civil rights and feminist triumphs into tangible accomplishments from the late 1960s to the 1990s. Raised in Seneca, SC, Maxwell-Roddey became a Charlotte desegregation/Black Studies torchbearer as the first Black women principal of a white elementary school (1968) and the founding director of UNC Charlotte’s Black Studies Program (1971). A cultural advocate, in 1974, she co-founded Charlotte’s Afro-American Cultural and Service Center, now the $18 Million Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Art + Culture. As a national figure, Maxwell-Roddey served as a forerunner who helped to institutionalize the field of Black Studies as the founder of its premiere professional organization, the National Council for Black Studies (NCBS), in 1975. She also rose to become an innovative leader of one of the most influential Black women’s organizations in the US as the 20th National President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. (1992-96). Under advanced contract, manuscript submitted for final review May 2021 to the University Press of Florida.
ARTICLE IN PROGRESS
“I Would Never Quit:” Betty Jo Johnson and the Gendered Experiences of African American Women Non-Union Industrial Workers in the Carolinas, 19602-2000s,” uses oral history to describe the historical experiences of Johnson and other Black women who desegregated the industrial and textile industries of the Piedmont region of the Carolinas from the mid-1960s to the 2000s. Due to civil rights legislation, African American activism, and growing economic expansion, factories in the piedmont region of North and South Carolina started hiring Black employees in the mid-1960s. In 1966, Johnson, age 21, became one of the first Black women hired to work at the Dunlop Tire and Rubber Factory Ltd, in Westminster, South Carolina. Over the 40 years that Johnson worked at Dunlop making golf balls, she encountered overt racism from white women workers, sexism from male managers, and consistent attempts relating to equipment and work environment issues to punish her for activism or force her out. While she won battles against discrimination, she eventually lost her job due to global economic market forces that led Dunlop to lay off most of its employees in 1995, rehire them with fewer benefits a year later, and in 2006, eventually close and relocate out of the US. Johnson’s experiences working in manufacturing from 1966 to 2006, contributes to our understanding of southern African American women workers, who could not join unions, but still waged individual and collective battles against racism, sexism, and globalization.