Dr. Leith Mullings
An open letter to our membership by ABA President,
Riché J. Daniel Barnes
posted to our listserv, 12/13/20
Leith made an impact in the world of Anthropology and Public Health through her scholarship which centered Black women’s experiences in the US, Africa, and the Diaspora (broadly). She trained many scholars through her tenure at CUNY Graduate Center and any and all who worked on Black Studies, Black women’s health, and Black freedom struggles. She and Manning Marable, her partner and noted historian and Black studies scholar, who passed away a few years ago, did much to ensure scholars working on issues pertinent to Black folks were trained in theory and methods with an eye toward action. I will personally miss her and her quiet leadership and mentorship.
In addition to being a founding leader in ABA, she also served as the President of the American Anthropological Association (2011-2013). We were fortunate to be able to honor her with the ABA legacy award at the 2016 ABA/AAA meetings.
The ABA will organize a celebration in her honor as soon as we are able to safely be in person. We are awaiting news from her family with details for her services and ways we can honor her in the interim. The Department of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center is also receiving notes and remembrances on behalf of her family and colleagues. Our hearts go out to her family, friends, and students.
To learn more about her work, see her websites:
She will truly be missed, but in her memory, we are charged with carrying on in scholar-activism and service.
TRIBUTES
posted to the American Anthropological Association https://www.americananthro.org/StayInformed/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=26034
Current President and Past Presidents
As Past-Presidents of the American Anthropological Association we mourn the loss of our colleague and friend Leith Mullings. We especially want to acknowledge all that she did for the AAA. Leith was President from 2011 to 2013. Before that she served on the AAA Executive Board between 2002 and 2004 and as President-Elect from 2009 to 2011. She was a gracious, graceful, and forceful AAA leader. She conducted meetings by giving everyone a chance to speak their piece, after which she would summarize the key points and submit a “spot-on” decision. She consistently created spaces of inclusiveness and recognition for those who came before and those who were to come. She was very explicit about the importance of collegiality, something she put into action on a daily basis. Collegiality, collaboration, and consultation that involved real and profound listening in the service of building common goals are attributes that characterized her leadership. She never lost sight of her commitment to social justice, and ensured that those common goals had social justice at heart.
Her research, writing and activism around issues of race, gender, and class have made a significant impact on the discipline, the students she taught, and the broader public. In the collaborative project she, Alaka Wali, and others conducted in Harlem in the 1990s, they focused on the health and lifetime risks for African American women that result from the impact of racism, their class status and their gender. In addition to these stresses, they also emphasized that Black Women have forged strategies of coping and resilience, calling this resistance to interlocking oppressions the Sojourner Syndrome.
Her Presidential Address was a crowning achievement during those years she was AAA President. It was an alternative intellectual genealogy of American anthropology examining the impact of social movements and the work of Black anthropologists particularly in generating anthropological theories that are counterhegemonic and position anthropology to make decisive contributions to education, advocacy and empowering marginalized groups. She emphasized the importance of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including the civil rights and anti-war movements and feminism. These included the work of Black and feminist anthropologists, which transformed American anthropology. Finally, she set forth the current challenges of the backlash against civil rights and the corporatization of the university. For her, the future of the discipline lay in collaborative and engaged scholarship, something her own life’s work exemplified.
We miss Leith’s warm personality, her keen intellect, and her ardent belief in social justice. She brought all these qualities to her service at the American Anthropological Association and to her teaching, her mentorship, and her relationship with colleagues. We will strive to honor her legacy.
Akhil Gupta
Alex Barker
Alisse Waterston
Monica Heller
Virginia Dominguez
Setha Low
Alan Goodman
Don Brenneis
Louise Lamphere
Yolanda Moses
Jim Peacock
Jane Buikstra
With thanks to Louise, Monica and Alisse for preparing the statement.
Alisse Waterston, Former AAA President (2015-2017)
It has been difficult for me to compose myself in the wake of Leith’s death. I am in shock and feeling devastated. I sent Leith an email on Sunday at 1pm. I did not know she had been sick and did not know she had died Sunday morning. I closed my note with “I look forward to hearing your voice.” Now I won’t ever again hear the quiet sureness of her voice except as I summon it in my head, which I’m doing right now. Like so