2019 HONOREES

Gwendolyn Midlo Hallis

Gwendolyn Midlo Hallis an award-winning American historian who focuses on the history of slavery in the Caribbean, Latin America, Louisiana, Africa, and the African Diaspora. Through her extensive research, she changed the way in which several related disciplines are taught, significantly contributing to the scholarly understanding of the diverse origins of cultures in the Americas. She created a database identifying and describing more than 100,000 enslaved Africans, which has become a primary resource for historical and genealogical research relating to the African Diaspora. Midlo Hall is the author of several books on reevaluating the history of African slavery, including the award-winning Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. She has been featured in the New York Times, People Magazine, ABC News, BBC, and many other outlets.

As a human rights activist, Midlo Hall helped organize the New Orleans Youth Council, an interracial direct-action community group, in 1945. In 1946 she was elected to the Executive Board of the Southern Negro Youth Congress to help end lynching, segregation, and voter suppression. She was also a primary organizer of the Youth Progressives movement in New Orleans in the late 1940s, an interracial student-run campaign to desegregate educational institutions in Louisiana.

As a human rights activist, Midlo Hall helped organize the New Orleans Youth Council, an interracial direct-action community group, in 1945. In 1946 she was elected to the Executive Board of the Southern Negro Youth Congress to help end lynching, segregation, and voter suppression. She was also a primary organizer of the Youth Progressives movement in New Orleans in the late 1940s, an interracial student-run campaign to desegregate educational institutions in Louisiana. 

KWESI DEGRAFT-HANSON

Kwesi Degraft-Hanson, PhD, was born in Ghana, Africa and has practiced landscape architecture in both Ghana and the United States for over 25 years. Based in Atlanta, his research on “Hidden Landscapes of Slavery” – spaces such as former plantations and slave auction sites in the American South that are unmarked and without commemoration – has inspired significant projects in the remapping and reimaging of landscapes for recreation as virtual sites that will bring new attention to the memories of former enslaved people who inhabited these places. He has taught landscape architecture and horticulture in South Carolina and Georgia, primarily at the University of Georgia, and at Ghana’s University of Science and Technology. Degraft-Hanson has published work in journals such as Landscape Researchand Southern Spaces Journal, the anthology Slavery and Freedom in Savannah, and the Saporta Report, an online publication of the Georgia Humanities Council. Now a principal of the noted architecture firm Eden Gardens International, Degraft-Hanson has been a leader in designing the 1996 Olympic Cycling and Archery venue at Stone Mountain Park; the Olympic Preliminary Basketball venue at Morehouse College; and the Olympic Athletes’ Village at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a founder of the nonprofit organization Oceans Inc., which seeks to garner support for the design, creation, and management of a national memorial to commemorate all who were enslaved in the United States and to honor the legacy of African Americans throughout our country’s history with the creation of local, regional and national spaces.