Last month, Vineyard summer resident Deborah Gray White was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The honor recognizes Ms. White’s career as a scholar of African American and women’s history.
The induction ceremony took place at Harvard a few weeks ago, and honored Ms. White and other inductees, including Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, Jodie Foster and Rita Moreno, to name a few.
“I’m not one for a whole lot of pomp and ceremony, but quite frankly, it was lovely,” Ms. White said in an interview with the Gazette last week. “It really was special to be recognized, particularly in the humanities.”
Ms. White, one of 250 inductees this year, has spent her career as a professor at Rutgers University, where she specialized in African American and women’s history. She is the author of several books exploring the experiences and contributions of African Americans throughout history.
Ms. White’s history on Martha’s Vineyard dates back to the 1980s, when she would visit the Island with friends. In 1991, at age 42, she purchased a home on the Island.
She now resides primarily in Washington D.C., but returns to the Vineyard whenever she can, often with her two daughters and six grandchildren. One of her daughters, Maya Pascual, teaches at the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School.
“I guess you could say we’re now three generations of Vineyarders,” Ms. White said.
Ms. White has a deep admiration for the Vineyard, particularly its history as a haven for the African American community.
“The Vineyard has always been a haven, and I think even more so nowadays for African Americans,” she said. “I think now with the Black freedom movement, and with the expansion of the Black middle class, there have been so many people who will come, if only for a couple of days. It is considered a place where we can feel safe.”
In her career, Ms. White has written several books, beginning in 1985 with the publication of “Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South.”
Looking back, she says this is the project she is proudest of, especially because of the impact it had on how enslaved women were recognized in historical records.
“When [the book] got to the Library of Congress, and this was in 1985…they actually had to hold an editorial meeting and create a subject catalog called ‘women slaves.’ They now have changed it to ‘enslaved women,’ but [at the time] they didn’t have a place for it, and that they created it as a result of the publication of that book,” she said.
This marked a shift in how the experiences of enslaved women were documented. The book helped bring greater attention to a group whose lives had been overlooked in historical scholarship.
Ms. White spoke about how little depth there was within the field when she first began her academic career.
“It wasn’t really a field that even professional historians took seriously. Maybe a few did, but not serious enough for it to be a major force,” she said. “But actually, we have moved African American history from the margins to the center of the field of American history.”
Throughout her career as a historian, Ms. White says she has witnessed a growing recognition of the importance of African American history.
“For years, it’s been neglected, but there’s nothing that you can say about America that doesn’t somehow include the history of African Americans,” she said. “I think my induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences reflects that.”
Ms. White said she also sees the honor as an acknowledgement of the continued importance of the humanities in the United States.
“I think the humanities is now coming back into focus,” she said. “I know that enrollment in humanities courses at a lot of universities is up, and so I think it’s important for us historians and artists to be recognized as central to American culture.”
Ms. White retired in 2024, but her work is not done just yet. She recently finished writing an autobiography, a project she said began just for herself.
She hopes to spend her retirement with her children and grandchildren, exploring her genealogy and finding a publisher to share her story with a wider audience.