UA Scholar’s ‘Clinging to Mammy’ Wins Human-Rights Award

TUSCALOOSA – A prestigious center for promoting human rights has honored Dr. Micki McElya, assistant professor of American Studies at The University of Alabama, for her book, “Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America.”

“Clinging” was one of 10 works cited by the 2007 Myers Center Outstanding Book Awards Advancing Human Rights. The Boston-based Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America recognizes books that “speak of too-often erased histories and too scantily noticed ideas and strategies for a more humane future.” The award was timed to coincide with Human Rights Day, Monday, Dec. 10.

“It is a great honor to be included among the winners of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award,” McElya says. “This award is particularly meaningful to me because it recognizes the possibility for scholarship to promote change and social justice.”

McElya’s book examines the image of the nurturing, faithful, enslaved woman and her hold on the American imagination. McElya exposes the power of the myth of “mammy,” an omnipresent figure in popular culture — from film, song and literature to advertising and our grocery store shelves as well as child custody cases, white women’s minstrelsy, activism, anti-lynching campaigns and the Civil Rights movement.

The civil rights center’s Web site praises McElya’s exploration of an effort by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the 1920s to build a national monument “in memory of the faithful colored mammies of the South” — for which the U.S. Senate voted a land grant, and its ultimate defeat.

McElya, who earned her doctorate at New York University, researches cultural history and the history of women in 19th- and 20th-century America.

The Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights (http://www.myerscenter.org), founded in 1984, was named in honor of Gustavus Myers, the historian who wrote “History of Bigotry in the United States.”

UA’s department of American studies is part of the College of Arts and Sciences, the University’s largest division and the largest liberal arts college in the state. Students from the College have won numerous national awards including Rhodes Scholarships, Goldwater Scholarships and memberships on the “USA Today” Academic All American Teams.