Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (October 22, 1941 – December 25, 2018) was an American professor of history and author. Terborg-Penn specialized in African-American history and black women's history. Her book African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 was a ground-breaking work that recovered the histories of black women in the women's suffrage movement in the United States. She was a faculty member of Morgan State University.[1][2]
While at Queens College, she was a charter of the college's NAACP chapter. Terborg-Penn headed a protest on campus when the school would not let Malcolm X speak on campus. She also organized student road trips, including a trip to Prince Edward County in Virginia, where schools were closed by anti-racial integration school officials. While there, Terborg-Penn and other students taught black students. Upon moving to Washington, D.C. to attend The George Washington University, she joined the D.C. Students For Civil Rights group who lobbied for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.[2]
In 1998, she published African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920. The work critiqued the received history of the women's suffrage in the United States for having erased the contributions of black women, and identified more than 120 black women that had played roles in the fight for the vote but had been given little recognition.[1] The book argued that, as the goals of black activists diverged from their white counterparts over issues of racial oppression, history was written with white women at the center. The work is considered a seminal work in African-American women's history.[1]
Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn and Andrea Benton Rushing. Women in Africa and the African Diaspora: A Reader. Washington: Howard University Press (1997). ISBN0882581945
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