Francille Wilson

19th-20th Century African American history; labor; race; gender

Francille Rusan Wilson is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California. She is an intellectual and labor historian whose current research examines the intersections between black labor movements, black social scientists, and black women’s history during the Jim Crow era. Her book, The Segregated Scholars: Black Social Scientists and the Creation of Black Labor Studies, 1890-1950, was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize for the best book in African American Women’s history by the Association of Black Women Historians. She co-curated “Rise Up LA: A Century of Votes for Women” at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and was a member of the historians advisory board for the National Archives exhibit, “Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote.”  Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa appointed Wilson to the Los Angeles Commission on the Status of Women in December 2007 and she was its president, 2009-2010. In 2011 Wilson was appointed to a four year term on the State Board of the California African American Museum by the Governor. Wilson was awarded the 2008 Bethune Award for Excellence in Education by Our Author’s Study Club of Los Angeles. She has served on the boards of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and the Labor and Working Class History Association, and is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She served two terms as the National Director for the Association of Black Women Historians, 2015 to 2018.  She was a 2017-2018 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

• Ph.D. American History, University of Pennsylvania, 1988