Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she became active in the civil rights movement at an early age. Hall helped to organize the New Orleans Youth Council, a militant, interracial, anti-segregation movement in 1945, and in 1947 she was elected to the national board of the Southern Negro Youth Conference. Her 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 briefly married Michael Yuspeh (a piano instructor), with whom she had one child, Leo Yuspeh.

From 1953 to 1964, Hall worked closely with Harry Haywood (also known as 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. Now divorced from Michael Yuspeh, Hall married Harry Haywood in 1955; they had two children (Rebecca and Haywood) before separating in the early 1960s.

Hall received both her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of the Americas in Mexico City in 1963. 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 where she worked as a legal secretary. In 1966, Hall entered the Ph.D. program in history at The University of Michigan. 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.

Hall received her Ph.D. in Latin American History in 1970 and accepted an offer as assistant professor from Rutgers University in 1971 and taught there through 1996. Hall was theawarded priofessor emeritus status at Rutgers. During 1990-1991, Hall served on several committees of the University Senate at Rutgers which were concerned with hiring decisions and inter-department politics. She has been a on the International Advisory Board Member of the Harriet Tubman Resource Institute on the African Diaspora, York University, Toronto, Canada and in 2007 was a Senior Research Fellow at Tulane University.

From the guide to the Gwendolyn Midlo Hall papers, 1939-1999, 1968-1999, (Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan)