[HTML1]Dr. Bettye Collier-Thomas, a professor of history at Temple University, is a nationally known historian of American and African American history, with particular expertise in the areas of civil rights, politics, religion, and women’s history. A leading figure in the field of black women’s history, in 1977 she founded, and for over a decade served as the first director of the Mary McLeod Bethune Museum and the National Archives for Black Women’s History which was designated by Congress as a National Historic Site in Washington, D.C. in 1982. In 1993 President George H. Bush signed legislation formally incorporating it into the Department of the Interior. In November 1994 Dr. Collier-Thomas received the Department of the Interior’s Conservation Service Award, in recognition of outstanding contributions to African-American Women’s History. In tribute to her work, Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the Department of the Interior, stated that “Dr. Collier-Thomas has established the only repository in the country solely devoted to the collection and preservation of materials relating to African-American Women in America!”
Dr. Collier-Thomas is the author of the best-selling and award winning Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (2010), published by Knopf, a division of Random House. In October 2010 she received an EMMA Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus, and the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Award from the Association for Black Women Historians for the book. She has also penned the best-selling Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons, and co-edited Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement. She is currently writing a history of African American Women and Politics.
In 1985 President Ronald Reagan appointed Dr. Collier-Thomas to the National Afro-American History and Culture Commission. She has received multiple grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Humanities Center, and Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion.
Dr. Collier-Thomas is the recipient of multiple grants, and fellowships from the Lilly Endowment, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Humanities Center, and Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion. Recognition for her role as a founder of the field of African American women’s history, and excellence as a scholar is extensive, including the National Black Women’s Political Caucus’s Shirley Chisholm Award for Excellence, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s Carter Godwin Woodson Distinguished Scholars Medallion, and was featured in a special issue of Dollars and Sense, as one of “America’s Top 100 Black Business and Professional Women.”
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