The Gwendolyn Midlo Hall Papers, 1939-1998, are comprised of materials documenting the professional and personal life of a historian and civil rights activist. The collection is divided into four series: Personal and Biographical, Academic Career, and Writings.
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall was born Gwendolyn Charmaine Midlo in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1929, in a family of Russian- and Polish-Jewish ancestry. Her father Herman Lazard Midlo was a labor attorney and civil rights attorney, who influenced Hall's thinking. She became active in the civil rights movement at an early age. She helped to organize the New Orleans Youth Council, a militant, interracial, anti-segregation movement in 1945, and was elected to the national Executive Board of the Southern Negro Youth Conference. Between 1947 and 1949 she also attended Newcombe College of Tulane University where she completed majors in European and American History.
Hall's deep commitment to the civil rights movement was visible when she was arrested in 1949 for violating segregation laws. Her family sent her to France from 1949 to 1953 where she learned French and studied classical piano. While in France, Hall married Michael Yuspeh (a piano instructor), with whom she had one child, Leonid "Leo" Yuspeh, born in 1951. In 1955 Yuspeh and Hall separated and later divorced.
From 1953 to 1964, Hall worked closely with Harry Haywood (his legal name was Haywood Hall), an African-American leader and member of the American Communist Party, who wrote on topics related to Marxism, particularly as it related to the civil rights movement and the condition of African-Americans in the United States. Hall married Haywood in 1956. They had two children, Rebecca and Haywood. Harry Haywood died in 1985.
Hall received both her bachelor's degree in History (1962) and master's degree in Latin American History (1963) from the University of the Americas in Mexico City. From there she moved to North Carolina, teaching history to students at the rural and predominantly African-American Elizabeth City State College, but her marriage to Haywood Hall and her revolutionary views made the administration so uneasy that she was fired.
Unable to find employment as a teacher, Hall moved to Detroit in 1965 where she worked as a legal secretary. In 1966, Hall entered the Ph.D. program in history at the University of Michigan. At the University of Michigan she also studied modern Russia, Medieval Islam, and Afro-American Anthropology. During this time, Hall also worked as a research assistant at the Bentley Historical Library, conducting oral history interviews with persons involved in various aspects of the heroin addiction problem. In November 1969 Hall wrote to the Governor of Michigan William Milliken urging him to stop the extradition to North Carolina of Robert F. Williams, civil rights activist and president of the Monroe chapter of NAACP, wanted on kidnapping charges. Williams was arrested and extradited to stand trial in 1975. William Kunstler represented Williams in court, Hall chaired the defense committee. Charges against Williams were dropped almost immediately. In the 1960s-early 1970s Hall published articles on the subject of civil rights and racism in Freedomway , Negro Digest, Black World, and The Black Liberator. In the 1970s Hall corresponded with H. Armand Austan, columnist for the Dayton Black Press. In his columns Austan wrote extensively on the subject of racism, prisons, and conditions of the inmates.
Hall's academic career began in the early 1970s at Rutgers University. During her tenure she wrote a number of important monographs on colonialism and slavery, such as critically acclaimed Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: a Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (1971), Africans in Colonial Louisiana: the Development of Afro- Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992; this book won nine prizes, including the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association), Africans in the Americas: Continuities of Ethnicities and Regions (2001), Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (2005), as well as numerous articles and book reviews. Based on colonial documents found in the courthouses of Louisiana, France and Spain, Hall developed and published in 2000 a searchable database of 100,000 descriptions of African slaves transported to Louisiana in the 18th-19th centuries.
In 2010 Hall accepted a position as Professor of History at Michigan State University. In 2012 Hall published a book about her husband Harry Haywood A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle: the Life of Harry Haywood.
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's awards and honors include the National Endowment for the Humanities "We the People Fellowship," (2006/2007); the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Service Award (2004); NAACP George Washington Lucas Community Service Award (1997); Guggenheim Fellowship (1996); Hall is the Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, elected by the National Assembly of France (1997).
