Dr. Regennia N. Williams (left) and Mrs. Joan Southgate.
Regennia N. Williams, PhD
On June 18, 2022, I had the honor of speaking with Mrs. Joan Southgate, the activist-author of In Their Path: A Grandmother’s 519-Mile Underground Railroad Walk (2004). As fate would have it, we both chose to walk through Cleveland’s Rockefeller Park during the Association of African American Cultural Gardens’ Juneteenth celebration.
I find it difficult to believe that it has been 18 years since Mrs. Southgate completed and wrote a book about her amazing journey across Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and Canada–just as many of our enslaved ancestors had done in their quest for freedom over a century ago. I was not at all surprised, however, when she began to share valuable Black history lessons with a child who had also visited the park on that beautiful Saturday afternoon.
We are all blessed to have someone like Mrs. Southgate in our midst, who will help us discover paths that lead to freedom and hope for a better future. If you have not already read her book, I hope that you will find the time to take a look at it.
About Dr. Regennia N. Williams, Founder, President, and Executive Director
Dr. Regennia N. Williams is the Founder and Executive Director of The RASHAD Center, Inc., a Maryland-based non-profit educational corporation.
Williams holds a PhD in Social History and Policy from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. A native Clevelander and a four-time alumna of Cleveland State University, information on RASHAD's “Praying Grounds, African American Faith Communities: A Documentary and Oral History” project is now available online at www.ClevelandMemory.org/pray/, a site that is maintained by CSU's Library Special Collections, home of the Praying Grounds manuscript collections. Praying Grounds was the primary inspiration for the launching of the Initiative for the Study of Religion and Spirituality in the History of Africa and the Diaspora (RASHAD) at CSU, and links to RASHAD's scholarly journal and newsletter are also available on the Praying Grounds site. On April 28, 2020, the RASHAD Center, Inc. became a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
In 2010, Dr. Williams was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, where she taught history and directed a RASHAD-related oral history project that focused on the role of religion in recent Nigerian social history. Other research-related travels have taken her to Canada, China, France, South Africa, and Austria.
In 2013, she conceived and produced “Come Sunday @ 70: The Place of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Jazz in World History and Culture, c. 1943-2013,” a project that included scholarly presentations and performing arts activities. From September 1993 until May 2015, she was a faculty member in the Department of History at Cleveland State University. She served as a Fulbright Specialist at South Africa's University of the Free State in the summer of 2019, and completed a short-term faculty residency at Howard University in the fall of 2019. She is based in Cleveland, Ohio.
As a public scholar, her current research projects focus on African American history and culture, especially as it relates to music, religion, and spirituality. She is a member of the Oral History Association, the Western Reserve Historical Society, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The RASHAD Center, Inc. 