Deborah McDowell’s Enduring Impact at UVA
By Lorenzo Perez
As Deborah E. McDowell’s friends and colleagues at the University of Virginia worked last week to finalize preparations for her retirement celebration, the Alice Griffin Professor of English recalled another party organized on her behalf nearly three decades ago.
McDowell had been on the English faculty 10 years already when she returned to her small Alabama hometown after publishing Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin, her 1997 family history about the Bessemer community where she grew up. Her homecoming included a celebratory luncheon organized by some of her K-12 teachers, including Mrs. Evans, who actually had not taught her. Mrs. Evans asked McDowell at the reception if she remembered her.
“I said, ‘How could I forget you? I’ve never forgiven you.’” McDowell recounted, recalling how Mrs. Evans had not let her enroll in home economics. The teacher’s explanation helped McDowell finally release the childhood grudge.
“She simply said, ‘We had other plans for you.’” McDowell recalled. “Now, this wasn't about Mrs. Evans or my other teachers trying to make me feel elevated above my classmates. It was just an example of teachers and community members observing and guiding my peers and me based on their assessments of our individual talents and potential,” McDowell said.
“Moments like that capture the investment that people around me had in me. I started primary school in 1956, two years after Brown v. Board of Education, and I was being taught by people who had lived under segregation and who believed, indeed insisted, on the vital importance of education as a means of fighting against segregation’s constraints. There was no option other than to be educated to the extent of your ability.”
That belief has fueled McDowell’s 39-year career at UVA, where colleagues praise her as a trailblazer, both as a scholar who expanded African American and African Studies and as an advocate who opened opportunities for aspiring scholars from underrepresented communities.
A conference celebrating McDowell’s career, organized by UVA’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies, opens Thursday, May 21. The four-day event has more than 115 confirmed attendees, bringing together generations of scholars, colleagues and former students sharing papers on McDowell’s work and legacy. (Visit the conference website for more details. Visit the livestream registration page to watch conference events online.)
Commonwealth Professor of African American and African Studies Robert Trent Vinson, McDowell’s successor as director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute, said the conference is an appropriate follow-up to the celebration held five years ago at the end of her director’s term, which coincided with the Institute’s 40th anniversary.
“This conference honors Deborah in a way that is appropriate for such an illustrious career within UVA and beyond. Simply put, Deborah's strategic vision, passionate commitment and sheer force of will has made the Woodson Institute the internationally renowned institution it is today,” Vinson said. “We raised co-sponsorships from over 20 departments and units, a fact that sums up Deborah's interdisciplinary collaborations and institutional importance. With special guests, close to 40 presentations, and musical performances, the event truly seeks to give Deborah her flowers.”
The conference’s title, “Love, All: Tending the Tradition,” captures something essential about McDowell’s work, said Christa Acampora, Buckner Clay Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.
“Professor McDowell has created the conditions of formation for generations of students and colleagues who carry her influence forward — as scholars, professors, and leaders shaping fields, building programs, and mentoring others as she mentored them,” Acampora said. “They leave here with a way of thinking and a sense of responsibility that stays.”
A lifetime of firsts
McDowell’s friend and UVA colleague Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton, an associate professor of religious studies, described McDowell as having “blazed trails all her life” when she nominated her for UVA’s 2018 Zintl Leadership Award. (The Maxine Platzer Lynn Women’s Center’s annual award recognizes female UVA employees whose service and excellence make a direct and significant impact on the University’s core academic enterprise.)
The first in her family to attend college, McDowell earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Tuskegee Institute before completing her graduate studies at Purdue. She came to UVA in 1987 after teaching at Colby College, where she was the only Black faculty member in the English department.
Within her new department, she found friends and allies among Susan Fraiman and Charlene Sedgwick and other colleagues.
“By then, I had made it my mission to work however I could to diversify the faculty, but with the help and support of many other people. This was a collective effort,” McDowell said. “I know that these days ‘diversity’ is a verboten term, but it still works for me.”
She founded and edited Beacon Press’s African American Women Writers Series for eight years, reissuing 14 novels by 19th- and 20th-century African American writers. McDowell also served as a period editor for the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, now in its fourth edition. As her reputation grew as a leading figure in the development of African American women writers and the study of African American literature, she took on one of her biggest challenges at UVA.
In 2008, she was asked to direct the Carter G. Woodson Institute, and what she anticipated would be a one-year interim role became a 13-year tenure. The institute then housed the African American Studies program — not yet a department, with the equivalent of one-and-a-quarter faculty and meager resources.
“The early days were rough. But you know, as my own mother often said to me, ‘You can be like a dog with a bone,’” McDowell said. “So, when I decided to take over Woodson, I was definitely like a dog with a bone; I was not going to be deterred.”
Robert Fatton, Jr., professor emeritus of politics, recalled those early struggles.
“There were moments when I thought, ‘Well, this is the end of it.’” said Fatton, whose UVA career began at the Woodson Institute. “African American Studies tended at the time to be something that was not traditionally taken seriously by administrators, but Deborah would never quit and she managed to keep it afloat and solidify it. … It was a daily struggle, but she was never afraid of the powers that be.
“Deborah is a force of nature, and she would speak the truth. No one would silence her, and she will be remembered for leaving the Woodson Institute and African American Studies at UVA in very good shape.”
Under McDowell’s direction, the African American and African Studies program gained departmental status in 2017. It now has 21 faculty, several with joint appointments in English, History and Media Studies. The department established a Ghana study abroad program and runs an annual January Term in Kenya. In 2021, as McDowell’s directorship ended, the College announced it would invest $16 million to support the Woodson Institute through endowed professorships and its prestigious fellowship program.
Each year, the Institute supports up to 14 pre- and post-doctoral fellows. Founded by Woodson’s first director, Armstead Robinson, the program brings fellows into a two-year residency to complete dissertations or book manuscripts while teaching and receiving feedback from faculty across Grounds and other notable scholars from around the country.
“We are very proud of that tradition,” McDowell said. “The Woodson Institute serves as a kind of greenhouse for these fellows, a place where they can flourish as they develop and work out their intellectual ideas in collaboration with each other.”
A forceful voice
Though retiring, McDowell will continue as Director of the Julian Bond Papers Project, which she began in 2013. Its aim is to digitize, annotate and publish the archive of Civil Rights Movement leader Julian Bond for scholars, students and the public.
Bond taught U.S. history and civil rights courses at UVA from 1990 to 2012 as an Arts & Sciences faculty member. The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library holds more than 47,000 documents from his career — speeches, correspondence and other materials spanning the major movements of the late 20th century.
With funding from the National Historical Preservation Records Commission, the project ramped up in 2021, in partnership with UVA’s Center for Digital Editing and the University’s Library. A $2.04 million Mellon Foundation grant now supports the project.
“Among the wonderful things about this sweep of materials is that we're able to see the ways that the work Julian and his cohorts did seeded other social movements,” McDowell said. “Working with this archive reminds us of how sluggish the pace of change can be, as well as how fragile are the achievements of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Julian was famous for saying racism survived the laws that were passed. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, etc., racism and racial discrimination have persisted and have survived those laws, which are under attack in this era. Look no further than how the Roberts Supreme Court has decimated the Voting Rights Act.”
McDowell was never shy about using her voice to hold university leadership accountable. She said her obligation as a descendant of the working poor is to challenge the status quo. “If I’m not willing to do that, I should just hang it up, hand in my badge, and go off and weave baskets.”
UVA has been her professional home for 39 years, and she considers the College the University’s heart. Asked what words she’d like to leave the leadership as she retires, she said she would urge the powers that be to fully embrace UVA’s history of this university —"the good, the bad and the ugly.”
"At this perilous moment, in particular, I would urge them to recognize the unique responsibilities of public universities,” McDowell said. “To embrace the necessity of shared governance, to resist the current winds of retrenchment, and to ensure that U.S. higher education can never be regarded as a privilege for the few rather than a right for the many.”