The WSU Humanities Center invites faculty, students, staff, and the community to a Brown Bag talk given by Karren Yurgalite (Master of Arts in Public History, 2023) on the topic of "Putting it all together: Combining historical research, municipal documents, and social history to discover the story of an early twentieth center Black women's home in Detroit"

Abstract: The Christian Industrial Club, a Detroit Black women’s club, founded and operated the Frances Harper Inn, a home for single Black women in the early twentieth century. The club, whose members were working class women, envisioned, opened, and ran the home from around 1915 until at least 1950. While no records of the club have been found, I wrote a National Register nomination for the club and the house. My research examined historical maps, tax rolls, census data, historical architectural descriptions, and church records which I then contextualized with social history writings of the eras. While important information on the house and the club is yet to be discovered, the research unfurled the story of the women’s vision and tenacity in the face of systemic racism.

This event will be Hybrid; please RSVP for the zoom link.