Pioneering academic who helped popularise the term ‘African American’
b September 4, 1945 d February 18, 2024
Dr Ramona Edelin, an academic-turned-activist who helped popularise the term “African American” in the late 1980s through her association with the Reverend Jesse L Jackson, and who later helped make charter schools a dominant force in DC education, died on February 19. She was 78.
Raised during the tumult of the civil rights movement, when she was ostracised by white classmates at schools in Georgia and Illinois, Edelin went into academia with encouragement from her mother, Annette Lewis Phinazee, the first woman to earn a doctorate in library science from Columbia University.
Edelin went on to receive a PhD in philosophy, writing her dissertation on civil rights, and helped launch the Afro-American studies department at Northeastern University in Boston in 1973. Under her leadership, the department soon changed its name to “African American studies,” embracing language that had circulated among scholars but was seldom used by the general public.
That began to change more than a decade later, when the term was adopted by 75 national black leaders in the lead-up to a 1989 gathering called the African-American Summit. The meeting was convened by Jackson, the civil rights leader and former presidential candidate, who embraced the term “African American” and was widely credited with inspiring its widespread use.
By all accounts, he and other black leaders in the group decided to adopt the term at the suggestion of Edelin, who had traded scholarship for advocacy. While helping organise the summit, Edelin argued that they should refer to themselves as African Americans instead of blacks. The term offered historical context, she said, and linked black Americans to the global African diaspora.
At a December 1988 news conference in Chicago, Jackson announced the preference for “African American,” speaking for summit organisers.
“Just as we were called Colored, but were not that, and then N .... , but not that, to be called black is just as baseless,” he said, adding that “African American” “has cultural integrity” and “puts us in our proper historical context”.
Weeks later, the New York Times published a front-page story reporting that many African Americans agreed with Jackson.
There were still plenty of holdouts. Some critics found “African American” too wordy and worried that it was less powerful than “black,” which evoked memories of the “Black is beautiful” campaign of the 1960s. Others dismissed the name-change debate as a distraction, saying it was far less important than issues like unemployment, drug addiction and economic inequality. For years, polls showed no strong consensus around the use of “black” or “African American”. Both terms remain in widespread use.
As Edelin saw it, the question of terminology was about far more than a name. “Calling ourselves African Americans is the first step in the cultural offensive,” she told Ebony magazine, linking the name change to a “cultural renaissance” in which black Americans reconnected with their history and heritage.
“Who are we if we don’t acknowledge our motherland?” she asked in a separate interview, adding that “when a child in a ghetto calls himself African American, immediately he’s international. You’ve taken him from the ghetto and put him on the globe.”
Edelin’s interest in economic and educational issues deepened during her years at the National Urban Coalition, which she joined in 1977 as an executive assistant. She became president and chief executive, leading the organisation from 1988 to 1998 while overseeing programmes that included a STEM initiative to promote maths and science education, especially among children of colour. Her work led to appointments on educational panels and civic task forces.
Edelin, a long-time Washington resident, emerged as a leading champion of the city’s charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run. Starting with a handful of schools and a few hundred students in the late 1990s, the DC charter system is now one of the largest in the country by percentage of enrolment, with nearly as many children as traditional DC public schools.
Critics charge that charter schools deprive traditional public schools of money and resources, and lack the financial transparency and accountability of neighbourhood schools. Edelin argued that the charter system offered muchneeded alternatives for families, including in low-income neighbourhoods, and saw the system “as an avenue for social justice” – a way to “create opportunities for quality education for all students,” said her friend Linda Moore, the founder of Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School.
Edelin championed charter schools in interviews and opinion essays, including for The Washington Post. Through the DC charter schools association, she also waged a years-long legal battle against the District, alleging that the city was illegally underfunding charter schools because of the way it split education funding. A federal judge sided with the city in 2017, although charter school leaders say that Edelin’s efforts led the city to expand its support for charter schools.
Ramona Hoage was born in Los Angeles on September 4, 1945. Her father, George, died in a motorcycle crash two weeks before her birth, and the family later moved to Atlanta and Carbondale, Illinois. After graduating from high school at Stockbridge, a progressive boarding school in western Massachusetts, she received a bachelor’s degree in religious and philosophical studies in 1967 from Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville.
That year, she married Kenneth C Edelin, a gynaecologist. He was later at the centre of a landmark abortion case, convicted of manslaughter – and formally acquitted on appeal – after performing a legal abortion in Boston in 1973. They separated that year and later divorced, although she publicly defended him during the abortion case.
Edelin completed a master’s degree from the University of East Anglia in England in 1969, while her husband was stationed nearby during a stint with the US Air Force. She completed her doctorate at Boston University in 1981, a few years after leaving the faculty at Northeastern. The university honoured her last year with the creation of a Ramona Edelin Award for academic achievement in Africana studies – the latest name for the department she once led.
Survivors include two children from her marriage, Kenneth Edelin Jr and Kimberley Freeman; a son, Ramad Speight, from a subsequent relationship with Alonzo Speight; eight grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
As she delved into activism and advocacy, looking to shape a political agenda that would “move us forward” and “reclaim our children”, as she put it, Edelin continued to reflect on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, whose social ethic had been the subject of her dissertation. She told the Los Angeles Times in 1989 that Du Bois had been as “right as a prophet” in predicting that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour line.”
“But it is up to us,” she continued, “to be sure that’s not the problem of the 21st century.”
– The Washington Post