Bringing Black History to Life

A desire to learn about the history of Black women and a passion for storytelling led Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor to study Africana studies for a brief time as a grad student. “I dreamed of writing screenplays and felt like I had to understand more about Black women because that’s who I wanted to write about,” says Pryor. “I soon realized that I was interested in the nuts and bolts of the historical lives that I study now.” Today, Pryor’s scholarship not only examines the untold stories of individuals from different moments in history, it also attempts to explain the present through a better understanding of the past. 

Pryor, professor of history, came to Smith College in 2009, soon after she earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of California Santa Barbara. She teaches courses on citizenship, race and racism, and the history of U.S. slavery, delving into how enslaved people’s histories are remembered and who remembers them. A recipient of the 2016 Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching, she designs her classes to help students make connections between anti-Blackness throughout history. Her classroom is collaborative. She invites students to explore archives, examine primary documents, and take ownership of their own learning. 

In writing what she had original planned to be her dissertation about turn-of-the-century anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, she became intrigued with the logistics of Wells’ trip abroad in 1893. Wells went to Europe by ship. Pryor wondered how she was treated on the ship and whether racism impeded Wells’ travel. “I was looking for a book that would answer my questions,” she says, “and there wasn’t one.”

In 2016, she published Colored Travelers, Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War. The book explores how the simple act of traveling emerged as a front line in the battle for African American equal rights before the Civil War. In fact, Black people used mobility and travel to expand their networks and to fight racism and inequality over 100 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. 

Pryor is also widely known for her study of the N-word. Her 2016 essay, “The Etymology of [the N-word]: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North,” published in the Journal of the Early Republic, won the Ralph D. Gray Prize for the best article of the year. And her 2020 TED Talk, “Why Is It Hard to Talk About the N-word,” which explores the complex history and impact of the N-word, has garnered more than 2 million views.

Pryor’s father was the groundbreaking comedic icon Richard Pryor; her mother, Maxine Silverman, was a white Jewish woman from Boston. Her background, she says, has given her a unique perspective into aspects of the Black experience that inform her scholarship, as her dad was legendary for highlighting the absurdity of racism in his comedy. In fact, she was inspired to study the history of the N-word after an incident in her classroom in 2010 when a white student quoted a line from a film, Blazing Saddles, co-written by her father that included the N-word. (Pryor says the student was not using the word as a slur.) The incident sent Pryor on what she calls a three-pronged journey: into the history of the word itself, into her own complicated relationship with it as a biracial woman, and into a reckoning with her connection to her famous and complicated father.

The result is Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me, due out in June from Simon & Schuster. It is a hybrid memoir and historical exploration that Pryor describes as “the story of how a single volatile word impacted my life, my research, my teaching, and connected me to my famous father, unlocking the love I had buried for years.” 

Pryor is also teaching a new class, Richard Pryor’s America, where students use his life as an anchor to look forward and back in time, in addition to doing research on their own family histories. 

In both the classroom and on the page, Pryor believes that inclusive, historically grounded conversation is not just intellectually important but urgently needed. At a moment when Black history is being stripped from textbooks and public spaces, she finds real meaning in the act of teaching it. As one of her students recently put it in class: Doing Black history right now is radical. Pryor couldn’t agree more, and says, “I feel really grateful that I get to be a part of it.”