Black Woman on Board In-Person
Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities in the United States. Author Donna J. Nicol tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Claudia H. Hampton, the California State University (CSU) system's first Black woman trustee, who later became the board's first woman chair, and her twenty-year fight (1974–94) to increase access within the CSU for historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. Amid a growing white backlash against changes brought on by the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, Nicol argues that Hampton enacted "sly civility" to persuade fellow trustees, CSU system officials, and state lawmakers to enforce federal and state affirmative action mandates.
Black Woman on Board explores how Hampton methodically "played the game of boardsmanship," using the soft power she cultivated amongst her peers to remove barriers that might have impeded the implementation and expansion of affirmative action policies and programs. In illuminating the ways that Hampton transformed the CSU as the "affirmative action trustee," this remarkable book makes an important contribution to the history of higher education and to the historiography of Black women's educational leadership in the post-Civil Rights era.
The University Library is delighted to host Dr. Donna J. Nicol, Associate Dean of Personnel and Curriculum in the College of Liberal Arts at CSULB, alongside Dr. Patricia Cleary, for a captivating discussion on Dr. Nicol's latest book and its historical significance.
Dr. Donna J. Nicol is the Associate Dean of Personnel and Curriculum in the College of Liberal Arts and professor of history at California State University Long Beach.
She is the immediate past department chair and professor of Africana Studies at CSU Dominguez Hills, a post she held from 2017-2023. She earned her doctorate degree in Educational Studies (with a specialization in History and Philosophy of Higher Education and a graduate minor in African American and African Studies) from The Ohio State University in 2007.
Dr. Nicol’s research focuses race, conservative philanthropy, and U.S. higher education, and the history of African American women’s educational activism. Her work has been published in Race, Ethnicity and Education, The Feminist Teacher (twice), History of Philanthropy, Palimpsest: A Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International, The Encyclopedia of American Women’s History, Encyclopedia of Multiracial America, and Habitus of the Hood. In February 2021, Dr. Nicol was a featured guest expert for the Al Jazeera English documentary, The Big Picture: A Race for America. Dr. Nicol has also published opinion columns on racism in philanthropy for Al Jazeera Digital and has appeared on the Insufferable Academics podcast, the Fresh Off the Vote podcast, and the Peace and Justice Radio Show.
Prior to becoming an academic, Dr. Nicol spent three years teaching secondary language arts and social studies for Los Angeles Unified School District and seven years in various academic administrative roles at Mt. St. Mary's College and The Ohio State University. She serves on the board of directors for the Historical Society of Southern California, co-principal investigator for the State of Black Los Angeles County Report (2023) and is active in a number of professional academic and social service organizations.
Patricia Cleary is Professor of United States History at California State University, Long Beach. She received a B.A. in History and English Literature at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and a Ph.D. in United States History from Northwestern University, in Chicago, Illinois. She joined the CSULB History Department immediately out of graduate school.
Cleary’s early research was on the intersections of gender and commerce along the eastern seaboard during the era of British colonization, featured in her biography of Elizabeth Murray, Elizabeth Murray: A Woman’s Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-century America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), and on the NEH-funded website based on Murray’s life, The Elizabeth Murray Project: A Resource Site in Early American History (www.csulb.edu/elizabethmurray), 2002-2013.
A foray into environmental history in the Mississippi River Valley in the late 1700s led her to the study of St. Louis, a settlement with a diverse and shifting population of Indigenous peoples, Europeans, Africans, and Euro-Americans in its first few decades. A St. Louis native, she examined the complex social, economic, and political dynamics of this predominantly French-speaking outpost of the Spanish empire in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis (University of Missouri Press, 2011).
While doing the research for that book, Cleary began to study the life, death, and afterlife of the Indigenous mounds and settlement that pre-dated the founding of the modern city, focusing not only recovering the history of the mounds and the Indigenous peoples of the area but documenting the processes involved in their absence in historical treatments. At various points, Euro-Americans embraced the myth of the “Vanishing Indian” and razed Indigenous monuments. They also celebrated — in order to claim the mantle of antiquity and justify removal policies directed against contemporary Indigenous peoples — the civilization of ancient mound-building peoples and nicknamed St. Louis “Mound City.” Yet dispossession was never complete, and Indigenous peoples continue to resist such efforts and work to reclaim the mounds. These themes are subject of Cleary’s forthcoming book, Mound City, which will be published by University of Missouri Press in 2024.