Audrey Smedley, one of the nation’s first African American women anthropologists, after completing her education in Detroit Public Schools, Audrey attended the University of Michigan on a scholarship. She intended to study law and dreamed of working for the United Nations. In 1954, Smedley earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in the history, letters, and law program and a Master of Arts in anthropology with a concentration in history in 1957 from the University of Michigan. From 1959 to 1961, she investigated the social and economic organization of the Birom ethnic group of Northern Nigeria to complete her dissertation in late 1966. Smedley is best known for her studies of the history of “race,” a concept that she argues emerged in the Americas to justify enslavement and genocide against Africans. She argued that folk culture popularized race while science gave it authority in her book Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (1993). She is the co-founder of the Museum of Afro-American History in Detroit (now the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History). Much respect to the pioneering social anthropologist who peacefully passed away at her home in Beltsville, Maryland, on October 14, 2020, 16 days before her ninetieth birthday. Thank you for your contributions. Rest in peace.
enemies too.