Black woman professor—White university

Black people, as a group, have been the victims of exclusion in almost all areas of the dominant American cultural life. Black women, in particular, have suffered because of race and sex. The result of these oppressions has been a general cultural silence and invisibility of all black people. Challenges to the racial status quo reached momentous dimensions in the 1960s—the era of the black revolution, and touched all areas of the national life in the U.S.A. However, when the smoke cleared, black women discovered that despite their efforts in the struggle, few of them reaped rewards. In the wake of the women's liberation movement that followed, the general consensus among women of color was that black meant black men and women meant white women. This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs, and one which black women have vowed to fight against. The university is one of the arenas for this confrontation. This paper looks at the experiences of one black woman in a prestigious Midwestern university and documents the nature of her experiences as a double minority. She voices the opinion that black women intend to struggle on to their rightful places in the academy. They can't go back, and they aim to stay.