Shennette Garrett-Scott
Assistant Professor of History
Phone Number:
Email: smgscott@olemiss.edu
http://history.olemiss.edu/2013/08/27/shennette-garrett-scott/

Key Words: African American history, Race and Ethnicity, Late 19th- and 20th-century U.S. History, Women and Gender, U.S. South, History of Capitalism Studies, Business History

Research Description:

Shennette Garrett-Scott's research interests join African American, women's and gender, and history of capitalism studies. Her dissertation focused on southern black women in the insurance industry from the late 19th-century to the Great Depression. Her book manuscript is "Let Use Have a Bank": The St. Luke Bank and Black Women in Finance, 1850s-1930s (forthcoming Columbia University Press, 2018).

Her courses taught at UM have included:

• African American History Survey to and since 1865
• African American Women's History
• Black Women’s Enterprise and Activism in the Long Freedom Struggle
• Oprah Winfrey: Gender, Race, and Power
• The Black Image in Popular Movies
• Origins of the Jim Crow South
• Experiences of Black Mississippians

Her publications include:

“Introduction,” with Juliet E. K. Walker, Special Issue on African Americans and Business: Race, Capitalism, and Power, Guest editors Juliet E. K. Walker and Shennette Garrett-Scott, Journal of African American History (Spring 2017)

"‘To Do a Work that Would Be Very Far Reaching’: Minnie Geddings Cox, the Mississippi Life Insurance Company, and the Challenges of Black Women’s Business Leadership in the Early Twentieth-Century United States,” Enterprise and Society (September 2016)

"'The Hope of the South': The New Century Cotton Mill of Dallas, Texas, and the Business of Race in the New South, 1902-1907," Southwestern Historical Quarterly (October 2012), which won the Texas State Historical Association's H. Bailey Carroll Award for Best Article of 2012

“A Historiography of African American Business,” Business and Economic History Online (2009), URL: http://www.thebhc.org/publications/BEHonline/2009/garrett-scott.pdf

Dr. Garrett-Scott's next projects include articles on black women's economic justice activism during the 1930s-40s and on black women industrial slaves, and two book-length projects: one on the Colored Merchant Association, a chain of black grocery stores formed in the 1930s, and Black Empire, which explores a colony of black sharecroppers, mostly from Alabama and Georgia, organized in the mid-1890s in Coahuila, Mexico.

Honors Theses:

Lewis, Brigitte (2021) The Legend of Neptune: A Portrait of Enslavement and Emancipation in 18th-Century Worcester County, Massachusetts (full text)

Davis, Leah (2020) Making It Make Sense: Black Undergraduate's Negotiation of Spiritual and LGBTQ+ Christian Identities Within the Black Church (full text)