These Women of Many Nations: Immigration Trends of Black Women to the United States 1960-2015


Ronda Sharpe, Women's Institute for Science, Equity and Race - Stanford University

The history of the American immigrant is centered on the European immigrant and fails to include the experience of the Black immigrant; therefore, we often think of Black immigrants as “newcomers” to the United States.  However, the Black U.S. community is comprised of three distinct group, indentured servants who arrived with slave captives, decedents from Black American slaves, and persons of Caribbean descent (Sowell, 1979).  Using United States Census data from 1960 to 2000 and American Community Survey data from 2001 to 2015, we examine the immigration patterns of Black women to the United States.  We are particularly interested in the changes in demographic characteristics, country of origin, location in the United States and labor market experience – occupation and industry.  We seek to expand the literature immigration to include the experiences of Black women.



About the speaker

Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe is founder and president of the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race, the first think tank to focus solely on the social, economic, cultural and political well-being of women of color.
She has served on the faculty at Barnard College, Bennett College, Bucknell University, Columbia University, Duke University, and the University of Vermont. She is the co-founder (with Sandy Darity) of the Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics (DITE) for which she served as the Associate Director from 2008 to 2014. At Bucknell University, she served as the university advisor for Tau Kappa Epsilon. While at Duke, she has served as Director of the Global Inequality Research Initiative (GIRI), the Research Director for The Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality and as the Associate Director of the American Economic Association Summer Program and Minority Scholarship Program. Additionally, at Bennett College, she has served as the Chair of the Department of Business and Economics and Director of Financial Literacy.



Date: 07 September 2017

Time: 12:00 - 13:00  CET


UNU-MERIT