BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL

Academic administrator and black women's studies professor Beverly Guy-Sheftall was born on June 1, 1946 in Memphis, Tennessee. She graduated with honors from Manassas High School in 1962, and at the age of sixteen entered Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. There, Guy-Sheftall majored in English and minored in secondary education. After earning her B.A. degree in 1966, she moved on to Wellesley College for further study. She completed her M.A. degree requirements at Atlanta University in 1970. In 1971, Guy-Sheftall returned to Spelman College as an English professor. She decided to help broaden the Women’s Studies Movement to include issues pertinent to African Americans. She received her Ph.D. in 1977 from Emory University. In 1979 Guy-Sheftall co-edited Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, the first anthology of African American women’s writings. Guy-Sheftall helped to establish two seminal resources for Black Women’s Studies. The first was Spelman College’s Women’s Research and Resource Center which she founded in 1981 and served as the director for over two decades. The second was the periodical SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women, which Guy-Sheftall co-founded with Patricia Bell-Scott in 1984. Her other books include Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers & Daughters (1991), which she co-edited with Bell-Scott; Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (1995) and Gender Talk (2003), which she co-authored with former Spelman College president Johnnetta B.Cole. Guy-Sheftall was awarded Spelman’s Presidential Faculty Award for Outstanding Scholarship. She is the past president of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) and in 2017 was  elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

"People see Obama in the White House and assume there's no such thing as racism or Oprah Winfrey as a billionaire and say, 'Women have made it.'"