This biography of educational activist and Black studies forerunner Bertha Maxwell-Roddey examines a life of remarkable achievements and leadership in the desegregated South. Sonya Ramsey modernizes the nineteenth-century term 'race woman' to describe how Maxwell-Roddey and her peers turned hard-won civil rights and feminist milestones into tangible accomplishments in North Carolina and nationwide from the late 1960s to the 1990s.



Born in 1930, Maxwell-Roddey became one of Charlotte's first Black women principals of a white elementary school; she was the founding director of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte's Africana Studies Department; and she cofounded the Afro-American Cultural and Service Center. Maxwell-Roddey founded the National Council for Black Studies and served as the twentieth National President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., one of the most influential Black women's organizations in the United States.



Ramsey illuminates the intersectional leadership strategies used by Maxwell-Roddey and other modern race women to dismantle discriminatory barriers in the classroom and the boardroom. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey offers new insights into desegregation, urban renewal, and the rise of the Black middle class through the lens of a powerful leader's life story.