Faculty Accomplishments

Bringing history to life

When MU's first tenured African-American professor, Arvarh Strickland, retired in 1998, his former students helped raise $500,000 to endow a professorship in his name. Wilma King holds the endowed position and uses it to research her many books on the experiences of African-American women and children through history.

An American Girl dolls sits nestled among stacks of Wilma King's books on African-American history. American Girl dolls portray girls from historical epochs, and come equipped with storybooks that describe their era and activities. King served as a consultant to the manufacturer of “Addy Walker,” an African-American doll of 1864, to provide historical details based on her research for the book Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America.

King encountered a student for whom the doll brought history lessons to life. “Students connect in different ways,” King says, “and teachers must be prepared to facilitate those connections.” As the Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Missouri Professor in African-American History and Culture, King connects on many levels with her students and peers around the country.

“Professor King brings lots of attention to the history department,” says graduate student Kyle Day. “When people at academic conferences learn where I go to school, they'll say, ‘Oh, do you know Dr. King?’”

Her reputation is earned in part by her prolific publishing. Her books, in addition to Stolen Childhood include The Essence of Liberty: Free African American Women during the Slave Era; African American Childhoods: Historical Perspective from Slavery to Civil Rights; Children of the Emancipation, a book for second and third graders,and We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible: A Reader in Black Women's History, which she co-edited. The latter won the Letitia Woods Brown Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians in 1995. She has also written and edited many compilations of articles and essays.

King is currently working on a textbook about African-American women, and a volume titled The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women in the Slave Era. For the latter, King has visited 18 archives in the upper and lower South. Her endowed position makes her research, and subsequent publications, possible.