Professor Robyn Spencer
Professor Robyn Spencer
The profile of Brooklyn College students is coming more and more to fit the historical age demographics of a typical college student (18–24 years old). That's just fine with the 2018–19 Visiting Endowed Chair of Women's and Gender Studies (WGS), Robyn C. Spencer. "I enjoy their youthful spirit, the lively discussions Brooklyn College students bring to my classes," she says. Spencer is on leave from Lehman College (CUNY) for the year she serves as chair of WGS and has a good sense of the similarities and differences among the CUNY colleges.
This newest historian on campus lives and works in the Bronx but is happy to be back in Brooklyn, where she was born and educated. Spencer attended public schools in Brooklyn, kindergarten through the twelfth grade, and has happy memories of taking swimming lessons on the Brooklyn College campus in the Plaza Building on the West Quad. "I love my Brooklyn upbringing," she exclaims. She grew up in East Flatbush but left the neighborhood to go to Canarsie High School. Canarsie offered a more diverse mix of people and the opportunity to "get used to eating bagels." Her own West Indian diaspora neighborhood felt like a "hidden gem," a safe place to be with familiar neighbors and annual block parties. Spencer acknowledges that Brooklyn felt like something of a well-kept secret, and its history as such stands in contrast to its status now as a rapidly gentrifying destination.
Spencer studied for her B.A. at SUNY Binghamton. During these years her interest in social movements began to emerge. As a woman of color, she felt isolated for the first time in her life living in a majority white environment. When a comedian came to campus with his own brand of "off-color, racist humor," Spencer felt compelled to speak up and sent a letter to the campus newspaper in protest. Subsequently, she took a class on women and social movements and from that point on she turned from an earlier focus on social policy to engage fully in her current areas of interest, civil rights and Black Power, Post-1945 social movements, African American women, and urban history.
A review of Spencer's recently published book, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, in The Western Historical Quarterly, describes the work as achieving a "rare feat." Reviewer Robert T. Chase compliments the author for offering "an intimate biography of a social movement….weav[ing] together a profoundly imbricated story of the ways in which radical politics, personal transformation, gender, and state repression shaped the everyday act of organizational resistance that sustained the Black Panther Party during its sixteen-year history."
Spencer finds much similarity in the role women have played in the Black Liberation movement of the 1960s and more contemporary anti-racism movements such as Black Lives Matter. Women have always been leaders, she observes, but they have had to fight for recognition and struggle against sexism. Given their important documented role in the movements, Spencer asks, why are so many of these women invisible?
Photographs are ideal for making the invisible visible and are often what spur Spencer along the path of deeper research. After seeing a picture of a displaced sharecropper tagged with the name of the plantation owners for whom he worked, Spencer went on to write her master's thesis at Columbia University on the Mississippi flood of 1927. The thesis became an article in the Journal of Negro History and was featured in the documentary When Weather Changed History. Similarly, photographs of a house in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, occupied since 1945 by the United Order of the Tents, intrigued Spencer, who is now engaged in a research project developed to gain an understanding of the organization. Originally founded as part of the Underground Railroad, the United Order of the Tents stands as one of the oldest lodges for African-American women in the nation. In addition to photographs, oral history inspires this dedicated scholar. As part of the overall Brooklyn College Listening Project, Spencer is having her students do oral histories of three generations of women. The students are also learning about Sarah E. Wright, the African American author of This Child's Gonna Live. Wright's husband, Joseph Kaye, will be coming to the class for a group interview and to share memories of his late-wife.
Spencer's own family life is well-integrated into her thoughtful absorption of history as well as significant events occurring in the current culture. She is the mother of a 13-year-old girl. The pair has enjoyed many opportunities to view the film Black Panther together. "We saw it in theater, twice, in our house. We saw it at a park. We saw it on an airplane. It has been all over." Spencer promised in a February 2018 column in Medium that she intended to ask her daughter “to use the tools of black feminism to re-imagine Wakanda." Spencer argures that throughout history "racism and sexism combine to easily dismiss black women as 'doers' rather than thinkers." Spencer did begin the conversation with her daughter to deconstruct these attitudes about black women, and, in fact, has gone well beyond the conversation starter that Black Panther has provided. "It's a year later,” she notes, “and now my daughter and I have seen the movie The Hate You Give. So it's an ongoing conversation. The world is confronting young children. By having these conversations, we are arming these children with tools."
Spencer sees herself as a "visible advocate for diversity on campus and for bringing change to the curriculum." She has already put in place a speaker series called Challenging Erasures: Reinscribing Black Women's History in New York. Mobina Hashmi, Women's and Gender Studies coordinator at Brooklyn College, speaks for us all when she says, "We're truly thrilled to have Robyn Spencer as the external endowed chair in WGS for this year. Her wonderful program of events on the theme of "Challenging Erasures" speaks directly to the interests and needs of our students. This series is especially important at this particular moment because it teaches us about the long history of black women's activism, in New York and the country, and so acts as valuable context for recognizing how black women's social, cultural, and political agency is still so central to progressive activism."
Back to Critical Thinking — November 2018
