I was the grateful recipient of the 2019 John Whiteclay Chambers Oral History Fellowship. The award supports graduate students as they conduct oral history interviews for their dissertation research. In addition to generous financial support, the fellowship also gave me the opportunity to share the findings of my interviews with members of the academy and those on the outside. On December 14, 2019, I delivered the second annual John Whiteclay Chambers II Graduate Fellowship Lecture. My talk, titled “Breaking the Silence, Healing Themselves: Black Women’s Stories from the Anti-Rape Movement” explored the interviews I conducted with nearly a dozen black women who were active within rape crisis centers between 1974 and 1994. These interviews play a crucial role in my forthcoming dissertation ” “Controlling Rape: Black Women, the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence, and the State, 1974-1994,” which examines African American women’s anti-rape activism in the context of the War on Crime.

This event was co-sponsored by the SAS Executive Dean’s Office, the Department of History, Rutgers Oral History Archives and Rutgers Living History Society.