Paula J. Caplan was a clinical and research psychologist, author of books and plays, playwright, actor, director, and activist. She was born July 7, 1947, and raised in Springfield, Missouri; attended Greenwood Laboratory School; received her A.B. with honors from Radcliffe College of Harvard University; and received her M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology from Duke University. She was an Associate at the Du Bois Institute, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University at the time of her death. She had been a Fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; a Lecturer in Harvard's Program on Women, Gender, and Sexuality and in the Psychology Department. She was a former Full Professor of Applied Psychology and Head of the Centre for Women's Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education; and former Lecturer in Women's Studies and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto.
In regard to her expertise in psychology and in women's studies, as well as her political/social action work, she appeared on many major network talk and news shows.
She gave hundreds of invited addresses to a wide variety of community and academic groups. She was interviewed frequently for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, and Psychology Today.
Among her plays, "Shades" (secret wounds that only love can heal) won the Pen & Brush New Plays Contest; "Call Me Crazy" (about the questions "Is anybody normal? And who gets to decide?") won second place in the 1997 Arlene and William Lewis Playwriting Contest for Women and other awards; and "The Test" (based on the poignant, true story of two men on Death Row) was published by Samuel French in its collection of winners of its 2001 Off-Off-Broadway New, Short Plays Competition. Her screenplay for "The Test" was made into a video that won the Alliance for Community Media-New England Film Festival and has been screened in numerous other festivals and various other venues. The number of books she authored or co-authored is in the double digits.
Before Paula passed away, July 21, 2021, she formed a nonprofit organization called Picture Social Justice (PSJ). The mission of PSJ is to promote social justice equity through film and television. Paula's vision was simple: raise awareness, educate, and advocate for those adversely affected by social injustice.
Not only was Paula the founder of Picture Social Justice, but she was the heart-and-soul of the latest film project, Execution by the Numbers. As you can imagine, Paula's untimely death interrupted efforts to complete the film project. But Paula's vision and body of work are too vital to the social justice community for it to be abandoned, so plans for completion have moved forward.
For more details of Dr. Paula Caplan’s life and work go to :
In September, 2023, a memorial was held in New York City to honor the life and work of Joan Love. There were speakers, years-old video footage of Love’s speeches, media coverage, tributes, and more. A feminist activist, Barbara fought for gay rights and for lesbians to have a voice in the early days of the women's movement.
Barbara Joan Love was born into an affluent and conservative family in Ridgewood, New Jersey, in 1937. She and her two brothers grew up with a maid and chauffeur and Sunday dinner at the country club. In her 2021 memoir, "There at the Dawning: Memories of a Lesbian Feminist", she described it as "upper-middle-class comfort". In high school, she was a competitive swimmer and won several state championships. She graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in journalism and had hoped to join her father's company, but he didn't think women were qualified to run a business. Instead, she worked in publishing as an editor.
In her early 20s Barbara registered as a Democrat, the first person in her family for generations to do so.. She began her activism in the late '50s as a closeted young woman in Greenwich Village, haunting the city's Mafia-run lesbian bars. In those days these bars were often raided by the police. A blinking red light signaled the police's arrival. Officers then warned the women not to dance or touch or they would be arrested.
Love was convinced by a girlfriend to cut her hair and dress more like a man. One evening their car broke down and a group of male thugs stopped to help them. Seeing her masculine appearance, the thugs beat her bloody. In those pre-Stonewall days, if you were discovered to be gay, you could be openly harassed, attacked, and/or discriminated against in all sorts of ways. Your own parents might turn on you. Until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality a mental illness.
But times were changing, and Barbara felt empowered. At age 33 she finally came out to her family.
Love was on what is now known as the National LGBTQ Task Force for 10 years and co-founded the New York-based Identity House with activists and therapists to help LGBTQ people find acceptance. She was involved in the establishment of PFLAG, an organization dedicated to the support and education of LGBTQ individuals and their families, which helped Love’s mother accept her. Her mother then participated with her in marches and other gay rights activities.
She forged lifelong friendships with those fighting for the same rights of recognition and equality for all, in her work with the National Gay Task Force; with the formation of Identity House; advocating for the recognition of lesbianism as a feminist issue by the National Organization for Women (NOW); as a board member of Veteran Feminists of America; and as an author of important works, from the first non-fiction book to put lesbianism in a positive light, Sappho was a Right On Woman: A Liberated View of Feminism (1972), to the record of many women and men who took news making actions in protest for change in the encyclopedic, Feminists Who Changed America: 1963-1975, and other books.
In the late 1920s, Ophelia Settle Egypt conducted some of the first and finest interviews with former slaves, setting the stage for the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) massive project ten years later. Born Ophelia Settle February 20, 1903, she was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a researcher for the black sociologist Charles Johnson at Fisk University in Nashville. Her work with Johnson led to her 1945 study, The Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Account of Negro Ex-slaves.
Over the course of her career Settle helped expose the infamous Tuskegee study of syphilis among black sharecroppers, and played a leading role in Charles Johnson’s “Shadow of the Plantation” study of the sharecropper system. As the Depression wore on, she left Fisk to assist with relief efforts in St. Louis. She accepted a scholarship from the National Association for the Prevention of Blindness to study medicine and sociology at Washington University, where, as a black woman, she was required to receive all her lessons from a tutor. She also became head of social services at a hospital in New Orleans, and five years later conducted research for James Weldon Johnson, about whom she wrote a children’s book. Egypt was a social worker in southeast Washington, D.C., and for eleven years was the director of the community’s first Planned Parenthood clinic, which was named for her in 1981.
Ophelia Egypt left a legacy for the future. In the early 1950s, Mrs. Egypt, a social worker in Southeast Washington, DC saw a problem in her community, and set out to solve it. In the neighborhood where she lived and worked, she often came in touch with impoverished mothers of large families. Many of them were hardly more than girls themselves, and they told her over and over that they felt that they had no options. They thought they’d never be able to obtain birth control information and services.
Mrs. Egypt thought otherwise. In 1956, Planned Parenthood hired her to bring family planning into her community. She did exactly that, with tireless commitment. Mrs. Egypt went door-to-door, visited in living rooms, spoke at informal neighborhood gatherings, handed out literature at public housing projects, and reached out to others in every possible way. Singlehandedly and singlemindedly, she persuaded community leaders, including clergy, that family planning was a means of empowerment that gave women and men more control over their economic condition.
In 1957, Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington opened the first private family planning clinic in Southeast Washington, DC, and for 11 years, Mrs. Egypt was its director. In 1981, three years before Mrs. Egypt passed away, the clinic was named for her.
Ophelia Settle Egypt died in Washington, D.C. May 25, 1984. She was 81.
This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the Rosewood Massacre, when hundreds of whites descended on the nearly all-Black community of Rosewood, Florida, intent on wiping out any trace of the town and its people. On New Year’s Day 1923, a white woman in nearby Sumner had accused a Black man of assaulting her. The hunt for her supposed assailant led a posse of whites to Rosewood. Residents there were apt to defend their homes, and a firefight left several of the white attackers dead. In retaliation, even more, white men poured into Rosewood, intent on its destruction. Most Black residents fled into the surrounding swamp, but those who could not were murdered by the mob, which also set fire to every building in town, save for the home of John Wright, a white man. Those who escaped made their way to the relative safety of Gainesville, but many would be haunted for the rest of their lives by the horror they had witnessed.
It’s important that we talk about what happened at Rosewood and the specific, individual stories of both those who perished and those whose lives were forever changed in January 1923. But we also must recognize that the story of Rosewood is, in many ways, not unique. In recent years the public has come to learn about other similar massacres—in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898; inElaine, Arkansas, in 1919; or in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. These are just a few examples of the full-scale attacks on Black communities that were typical in the United States between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the “Red Summer” of 1919 alone, violence of the kind that was perpetrated in Rosewood broke out in dozens of cities across the country. In fact, Rosewood isn’t even unique in the scope of Florida history. Seven years before Rosewood,in 1916, at least six African Americans were lynched in Newberry. Four years later, in 1920, dozens of Black Floridians were killed in Ocoee on Election Night. And less than a month before Rosewood, whites murdered Black residents of Perry, Florida, and burned down Black homes and community institutions.
In many ways, the Rosewood story follows a pattern that we see elsewhere, of a white woman’s accusation against a Black man that escalated into a full-scale assault by a white mob against an entire Black community, sometimes to the point—as happened in Rosewood—that the entire community was murdered or dispersed, and material evidence that it had ever existed was destroyed. The fact that this started with the accusation that a Black man had assaulted a white woman is important because the idea that this kind of violence was necessary to protect white women was central to the story that whites, and especially Southern whites, told themselves and each other about why this kind of violence was both necessary and justified.
We know, of course, that this was a lie. AsIda B. Wells showed three decades before Rosewood, very often, it wasn’t that white women were being threatened by Black predators, it was that the institutions of white supremacy were being threatened by Black people and Black communities that were standing in their power. In Elaine it was Black farmers organizing to get fair wages. In Ocoee, it was Black citizens clawing back the political power they were denied under Jim Crow. In Tulsa, it was Black Oklahomans who had built a community so economically prosperous that it was nicknamed “Black Wall Street.” And throughout the Red Summer, it was Black veterans who were returning from war to make the world safe for democracy and determined to make the United States live up to its own democratic promise.
Rosewood is exceptional in that reparations were actually paid to survivors. This happened in Florida through a bill passed by the legislature in 1994 that granted $150,000 to each of the living survivors. That wasn’t enough, and it was much lower than the survivors had hoped to get, but it was something. And it was made possible because people told the truth about what had happened in Rosewood. On one hand, a team of historians assembled research into a report on the massacre, and on the other hand, a handful of survivors described not only the horrors they had witnessed but how they and their families had been permanently scarred by what they endured.
As in so many of these other stories, the families that were driven out of Rosewood lost everything. They lost their homes, their land, their belongings and family heirlooms, their community, and any sense of security they might have had.
But thinking about the role that historians and historical testimony played in getting some measure of justice for the Rosewood survivors, it’s hard not to also think about the way that lawmakers in Florida and a handful of other states are trying to skew the teaching of history away from any topic that might undermine the idea that we have ever been anything but great. They threaten educators who even come close to challenging this narrow line of thinking when it comes to events like Rosewood.
These attempts to short-circuit discussions are about more than just scoring political points. In a larger sense, recognizing this history makes it clear to us that the way things are is not the way things have to be. The parts of the country that are entirely white aren’t that way just because people “like to be with their own kind,” but because people were driven out of places like Rosewood or because other African Americans saw what had happened there and elsewhere and decided that it just wasn’t safe to be around white people. The suburbs weren’t overwhelmingly white for decades because Black people didn’t want to live in them; it was because there was an entire architecture of policy and practice—including violence—that kept the suburbs that way. And we have a massive racial wealth gap in this country partly because Black people were dispossessed of their property through violence.
Recognizing that the way things are is not the way things have to make the study of history—the true study of history, not the veneration of some glorified past—threatening to people who want to maintain the status quo. Because studying history means seeing the paths not taken and the opportunities foreclosed. It means being able to imagine a present that is better than the one we’re living in. And it makes it possible to imagine and build a more just future.
That’s what it means to learn and teach the history of Rosewood in 2023.
AUTHOR: Dan Royles is an assistant professor of history at Florida International University in Miami. His first book, To Make the Wounded Whole: African American Responses to HIV/AIDS (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), examined the diverse ways that black communities have responded to the HIV/AIDS epidemic over the last thirty-five years, and was a finalist for the Museum of African American History's Stone Book Award. Follow him on Twitter @danroyles.
An excerpt from an essay by Daryl Michael Scott, Howard University, for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. https://www.blackhistorymonth.gov/About.html
The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society.
As a Harvard-trained historian, Carter G. Woodson, like W. E. B. Du Bois before him, believed that truth could not be denied and that reason would prevail over prejudice. His hopes to raise awareness of African American's contributions to civilization was realized when he and the organization he founded, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), conceived and announced Negro History Week in 1925. The event was first celebrated during a week in February 1926 that encompassed the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The response was overwhelming: Black history clubs sprang up; teachers demanded materials to instruct their pupils; and progressive whites, not simply white scholars and philanthropists, stepped forward to endorse the effort.
By the time of Woodson's death in 1950, Negro History Week had become a central part of African American life and substantial progress had been made in bringing more Americans to appreciate the celebration. At mid–century, mayors of cities nationwide issued proclamations noting Negro History Week. The Black Awakening of the 1960s dramatically expanded the consciousness of African Americans about the importance of black history, and the Civil Rights movement focused Americans of all colors on the subject of the contributions of African Americans to our history and culture.
The celebration was expanded to a month in 1976, the nation's bicentennial. President Gerald R. Ford urged Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” That year, fifty years after the first celebration, the association held the first Black History Month. By this time, the entire nation had come to recognize the importance of Black history in the drama of the American story. Since then each American president has issued Black History Month proclamations. The association—now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH)—continues to promote the study of Black history all year.
