When I met Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey in 1985, she was already a living legend in Charlotte’s educational circles. Even before I met her, I knew that she had started UNC Charlotte’s Black Studies Program (which eventually evolved into the current Africana Studies Department), and I had heard that she had an illustrious career as a teacher and principal in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System before joining UNC Charlotte’s College of Education in 1970. Since that initial meeting with her, I have taken an interest in her life and career, so I was pleased when I learned that the University Press of Florida recently published Dr. Sonya Y. Ramsey’s Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership. For more information about this book, please click on the following link: https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813069326
Sonya is a Full Professor in the History Department at UNC Charlotte. She also serves as the current Director of UNC Charlotte’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She has a long-standing interest in the history of education, and she wrote on this topic in her first book, which is titled Reading, Writing, and Segregation: A Century of Black Women Teachers in Nashville. Since her first book is about the schools in her hometown of Nashville, I wondered why she decided to write a biography of a Charlotte educator. I contacted Sonya and asked her for more information about how she became interested in writing a book about Bertha Maxwell-Roddey. Here is what she sent to me:
After relocating from Texas in 2007 and completing my first year teaching history at UNC Charlotte, I finally finished my first book on the history of African American teachers in Nashville. Now, I had to find a new research project. In the fall of 2008, I attended Africana Studies Program’s first annual Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey Distinguished Africana Lecture. That night would shape the next few years of my life. I knew that Dr. Maxwell-Roddey founded UNC Charlotte’s then Black Studies Program, but her name seemed so familiar in some other context, but I couldn’t figure out why. As soon as she walked in, I remembered.
When they announced her name, UNC Charlotte’s Delta Sigma Theta Sorority’s Inc. Iota Rho Chapter quickly stood up to attention. Disclaimer here: I am also a Delta Sigma Theta Sorority member, but I have not participated in sorority activities for years. I felt so embarrassed because Delta Sigma Theta and the other African American national sororities are public service organizations. Participation begins in college and continues after graduation for the rest of your life. After getting over my feelings of guilt, I started to learn more about this woman who was the 20th National President of Delta Sigma Theta.
I realized that this local educational activist was a forerunner in Charlotte’s school desegregation struggle as one of the first Black women principals of a white elementary school in Charlotte in 1968, was the founding director of UNC Charlotte’s Africana Studies Department and co-founded the Afro American Cultural and Service Center in the early 1970s, which became the Harvey B. Gantt Center for the Arts + Culture. Nationally, she founded the National Council for Black Studies in 1974 and led Delta as its 20th National President from 1992 to 1996. She even grew up in Seneca, SC, only a few miles from where my mother grew up, and I spent my summers with my grandmother. I soon had no doubt that I had found the subject for my next research project.
Unlike novelists, whom I imagine have burning passions for writing that cannot be quenched, I have mixed feelings about writing. While I do love to research and write, I often find it a pressure-filled undertaking that I most enjoy after it’s done. As a former journalism major in college, I loved to learn about people’s lives, but after working as the entertainment editor of The Hilltop, Howard University’s college newspaper, and completing several college newspaper internships, I realized that I had no interest in interviewing arrogant minor celebrities or rushing towards a potentially dangerous event to be first on the scene. So, I soon returned to my first love, the pursuit of history. I managed to get accepted into UNC Chapel Hill’s history program with fellowships, where I began a journey of historical discovery that would bring a newness to the familiarity of local history and attention to the lesser understood experiences of African American women teachers.
Several years have passed since I first decided to write a biography of Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey. As a scholar of recent history, I have the extraordinary opportunity to conduct oral history interviews. Nevertheless, this research process was both rewarding and frustrating as I felt that I had to become a detective because so many well-minded declutterers had tossed or destroyed historical records. Even though UNC Charlotte’s Atkins Library Special Collections housed several valuable archival collections, much of the documentary evidence for this book remained in the personal historical collections that lay in weathered boxes in people’s basements, garages, and attics.
Despite these travails, I cherished visiting with Dr. Maxwell-Roddey as she shared her life story with me. As a charismatic and brilliant woman with wit and humor, she had the uncanny ability to make people do service or work on projects far beyond their job descriptions. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey enthusiastically empathized that she did not think she left a legacy, but it was clearly visible when you visited the Gantt Center, sat with her former students from the 1970s during their weekly visits, or observed her sorority sisters who helped to prepare her to attend many of the events that she is still invited to attend.
My new book, Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership, the story of the life and vision as an educational activist is not just a biography of a phenomenal woman. It represents the untold story of Black women and others who fought to turn the promises and achievements of the civil rights and feminist movements into tangible realities as they fought to make desegregation work in the quiet aftermath of the public civil rights marches and the fiery speeches of Black Power activists in the board rooms and classrooms of the desegregated south from the 1970s to the 1990s.
I congratulate Sonya on the publication of her biography of Bertha Maxwell-Roddey. By researching and writing this book, she has succeeded in telling the true and inspiring story behind one of the most famous names in the history of Storied Charlotte’s educational institutions.