Barbara Joyce Ross

Historian Barbara Joyce Ross, or B. Joyce Ross, is best known for her groundbreaking study of the early NAACP, published in 1972, as well as for her biographical article on Mary McLeod Bethune, published in 1975.

In a review of the book, J. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP, 1911-1939, for the American Historical Review, James M. McPherson called it “more than a fine study of Joel Spingarn’s role in the NAACP; it is the best account we have of the association during its first three decades.” According to August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, her book was part of a wave of scholarship published by a “new corps of black historians” that included books by David Levering Lewis on King (1970), Mary Frances Berry on Black resistance (1971) and John W. Blassingame on The Slave Community (1972).1

Ross grew up in Augusta, Georgia, and attended elementary school and high school there. “Even as a grade-school student,” she later said, “I enjoyed history.”2 She attended Clark College in Atlanta, graduating in June 1960, and was awarded a Florina Lasker Fellowship to pursue graduate study in American History at Northwestern University.3 She hoped to specialize there “on the years 1828 to 1865.”4

After completing the requirements for her Master of Arts in History degree at Northwestern in 1961, Ross initially joined the faculty of South Carolina State College, where she was teaching history by January 1962.5 But she returned to graduate study at American University, where she graduated with her doctoral degree in May 1969. Ross’s dissertation, with the same title as her book, was directed by Thomas Di Bacco, with August Meier (then at Kent State University) as second reader.6

While completing her dissertation, Ross was also teaching at Howard University, but in the Fall of 1969, she joined Meier at Kent State, where she taught an Afro-American history course.7 The Journal of American History reported in its March 1970 issue that she had been appointed assistant professor at Kent State.8 During that same academic year, she delivered a talk at Stanford University on Spingarn, Du Bois, and the NAACP.9

By August 1970, the Pacific Historical Review reported that she had been appointed to an assistant professorship at Stanford.10

  1. August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 179.↩

  2. “Three UNCF Co-Eds Win Graduate Study Grants,” Kansas City Call, June 24, 1960, 22, on Newspapers.com.↩

  3. “Barbara Ross,” Atlanta Daily World, June 8, 1960. The Florina Lasker Fellowship was established in 1949 to “aid in the education of Negro women” and candidates were chosen from graduating seniors at member colleges of the United Negro College Fund.↩

  4. “Three UNCF Co-Eds Win Graduate Study Grants.”↩

  5. “Miss Barbara Ross Speaker for Delta Theta Sigma Today,” Atlanta Daily World, January 12, 1962.↩

  6. Meier mentioned Ross’s “unpublished but perceptive” dissertation in an article with Elliott Rudwick published in June 1970. See “Organizational Structure and Goal Succession: A Comparative Analysis of the NAACP and CORE, 1964–1968,” Social Science Quarterly 51, no. 1 (June 1970): 9, on JSTOR. Meier was general editor of the “Studies in American Negro Life” book series from Atheneum that published Ross’s book.↩

  7. “New History Classes Added,” Daily Kent Stater, April 9, 1969, link.↩

  8. “Historical News and Comments,” Journal of American History 56, no. 4 (March 1970): 983, on JSTOR.↩

  9. “White, Black NAACP Leaders’ Ties Outlined,” Stanford Daily, November 24, 1969, link. The talk had been slightly postponed, according to the Daily, because of unspecified “unexpected developments at Professor Ross’s home institution.” See “Campus Round Up,” Stanford Daily, November 20, 1969, link.↩

  10. “Historical News,” Pacific Historical Review 39, no. 3 (August 1970): 406, on JSTOR. See also “Historical News,” Pacific Historical Review 39, no. 4 (November 1970): 562, on JSTOR. An ACLS page later lists her as an assistant professor at Stanford in 1975. See also “Historical News and Comments,” Journal of American History 61, no. 1 (June 1974): 275.↩