Rosalyn Terborg-Penn

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (October 22, 1941 – December 25, 2018) was an American professor of history and author. Terborg-Penn specialized in African-American history and black women's history. Her book African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 was a ground-breaking work that recovered the histories of black women in the women's suffrage movement in the United States. She was a faculty member of Morgan State University.

Early life and education Born Rosalyn Marian Terborg in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother Jeanne Terborg (née Van Horn; 1916–2007) was a clerical worker from Indianapolis, and her father Jacques A. Terborg (d. 1997) was a Suriname-born jazz musician. In 1951, her family moved to Queens, where she graduated from John Adams High School in 1959. In 1963, she received a degree in history from Queens College, City University of New York. Terborg-Penn moved to Washington, D.C., earning her master's degree in United States diplomatic history from the George Washington University. Terborg-Penn then obtained her Ph.D. from Howard University in African-American history before 1965. She also was a faculty member at the University of Maryland, Baltimore and Howard Community College. In 1977 she co-founded the Association of Black Women Historians and served as the organization's first national director.

In 1998, she published African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920. The work critiqued the received history of the women's suffrage in the United States for having erased the contributions of black women, and identified more than 120 black women that had played roles in the fight for the vote but had been given little recognition. The book argued that, as the goals of black activists diverged from their white counterparts over issues of racial oppression, history was written with white women at the center. The work is considered a seminal work in African-American women's history.

Notable works

Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn and Andrea Benton Rushing. Women in Africa and the African Diaspora: A Reader. Washington: Howard University Press (1997).