2016 Fellowship Recipient – Melissa Cornelius Lang

We are pleased to announce the recipient of the 2016 Oregon Women’s History Consortium Fellowship is Melissa Cornelius Lang. Ms. Lang is a student in the Masters of Arts in History program at Portland State University and her focus is public history. Her project addresses the grassroots activism of African American women in Portland in the “classical” period of civil rights in the 1940s and 1950s. She will research women’s activism and community building in local clubs and organizations and in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and their campaigns for Oregon’s 1949 Fair Employment Practice Law and 1953 Public Accommodations Act.

We had a great group of fellowship selection committee members, including Marisa Chappell, Oregon State University, Geoff Wexler, director of the Oregon Historical Society Library, Carmen Thompson of Portland State University and Portland Community College, and Eliza Canty-Jones, Editor of the Oregon Historical Quarterly, & Director of Community Engagement, and Kimberly Jensen, Associate Professor Western Oregon University.