Wanda A. Hendricks teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on African Americans, African American women and the United States from 1865 to the present.

Her primary focus is on the social and political experiences of African Americans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is the author of Gender, Race, and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women In Illinois, published by Indiana University Press in 1998 and is a senior editor of the three volume Black Women In America published by Oxford University Press in 2005. Her essay ”On the Margins: Creating a Space and Place in the Academy” was published in Spring 2008 in Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (University of North Carolina Press).

Current Activities

Her current research is a biography of Fannie Barrier Williams, a 19th and early 20th century black female reformer and intellectual. Born in Brockport, New York in 1855, Williams came of age during one of the most volatile periods in American history. A clubwoman, activist and prolific writer, she played a significant role in shaping the social welfare agenda for African Americans while she challenged the racism and discrimination that plagued black life.

In 2007 she received the Outstanding Achievement in Historic Preservation Award from The Lucy Craft Laney Museum in Augusta, Georgia for her work in African American History.

She is currently raising funds for the Organization of American Historians Darlene Clark Hine Award for the Best Book on Black Women and Gender History.

Contributions can be made online at:

https://www.oah.org/giving/hineprize.html