Dr. Tammy C. Owens of Skidmore College joins us to discuss her 2019 article “Fugitive Literati: Black Girls’ Writing as a Tool of Kinship and Power at the Howard School.” Having discovered a treasure trove of letters written in the early 1900s by girls at the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School, Owens was off on a journey to learn more. The research took her from the Schomburg Center in Harlem to Tuskegee University in Alabama and, ultimately, to the doorstep of the Kings Park Heritage Museum.

What Owens pieced together was the story of young Black orphans forging connections and support networks through a unique institution known by some as the Tuskegee of the North. The letters she found tell personal and sometimes painful stories, often by the details which they leave out. Owens’ research brings to light voices that are often overlooked or missing from archival collections. We hear her thoughts on the process, the historians and authors who inspire her, and the story of her life-changing day riding around Kings Park with Leo P. Ostebo.

Further Research

• Owens, T. C. (2019). Fugitive literati: Black girls’ writing as a tool of kinship and power at the Howard School. Women, Gender, and Families of Color, 7(1), 56–79. https://doi.org/10.5406/womgenfamcol.7.1.0056
• Howard Orphanage and Industrial School Photograph Collection (NYPL Schomburg Center)
• Leo P. Ostebo Kings Park Heritage Museum
• Tuskegee University History and Mission
• Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman (find in a library via WorldCat)
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs (find in a library via WorldCat)
• The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Craft (find in a library via WorldCat)
• Darlene Clark Hine