‘Hearing Silences’ documents the experiences of Northwestern Black women faculty

• Link to: Northwestern Now Story

From the first Black woman to be tenured by Northwestern University to a vastly expanded community of Black women faculty five decades later — their stories are the subject of a new documentary, screening this week on the Evanston campus.

“Hearing Silences: 50 Years of Black Women Faculty at Northwestern” will debut Tuesday, Feb. 25, at 5 p.m. at the McCormick Foundation Center, 1870 Campus Drive, Evanston.

The event is free and open to the Northwestern community. Register to join the virtual screening at the same time.  

A 37-minute film, “Hearing Silences” documents the trials and triumphs of Black women faculty spanning generations, beginning with Joyce Hughes, a professor at Pritzker School of Law for more than 40 years and the first Black women to earn tenure at Northwestern in 1979, and Sandra Richards, the first Black woman to earn tenure in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, who taught in the African American studies and theatre departments for more than 25 years. It continues through decades to the present with personal accounts by faculty who followed in those trailblazers’ footsteps while pushing the boundaries further, like Heather Pinkett, an associate professor in the department of molecular biosciences, where she serves as the only Black faculty member.

“This is the story of Black women educators helping to desegregate the Northwestern faculty,” said former School of Education and Social Policy (SESP) professor Diana Slaughter Kotzin, who taught courses to aspiring teachers for 20 years from 1975 to 1995. Kotzin, the second Black women to receive tenure at Northwestern, is featured in the documentary — she also came up with the idea to make it and provided funding.

To make the film, Kotzin tapped a fellow Black woman faculty member at Northwestern.

“I hope that the Northwestern community will see this, in a sense, as a gift,” said Ava Greenwell, a triple alum who has been teaching journalism at Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communication for more than three decades. “When we talk about a gift, we talk about something that is thoughtful, something that will last forever for the person, or in this case the University, to whom it is given, and something that has an impact in perpetuity.”

Greenwell produced the documentary “Mandela in Chicago” and has spent much of her academic life researching Black women in the professional spheres.

She led the fundraising effort and did much of the legwork for “Hearing Silences,” arranging interviews and tracking down archival material used in the film. She also spearheaded the development of an archive to make the source material, including the transcripts and videos of the full interviews and the names of almost 300 academics, available to researchers and the community in perpetuity.

“That’s the part to me that is so important,” Greenwell said. “It’s not just a project for today, it’s a project for the future.”