Smith Family Calendar, 20XX, 8.5 x 11,” Courtesy of Dr. Milton Smith, DDS, and the Smith family.
Looking for Anita Hall
2021-present
Anita B. Smith Hall (1911-1999), was an ichthyologist who co-founded the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), the first such program in the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). A professor at Hampton for over forty years, Hall was also the first Black graduate student to have attended the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Scripps/SIO) and the first Black marine biology Ph.D. student in the University of California system (Day 2002).
The history of Professor Hall’s time at Scripps, her long career at Hampton, and her contributions to marine science and marine science teaching in HBCUs have, so far, gone largely unexamined. Many of the materials that illuminate the outlines of Hall’s story are misclassified, hidden out of view, rendered incidental, private, or subjugated to another story. Yet Hall’s history has not been entirely forgotten or erased.
Memories of “Ma Hall,” as she was known to her students and community, are cherished and kept in the relations, images, and correspondences held dear by Hall’s family, kin, and colleagues at Hampton. These are ways of knowing Ma Hall that endure but are not necessarily matters of official or institutional record. Although Hall’s extensive papers were lost or misplaced, partial records of her research and accomplished career are extant on the edges and margins of an array of institutional archives.
Looking for Anita Hall follows her path—one that tracks with the arc of the Civil Rights movement—throug images and records from Hall’s early years growing up in Selma, Alabama, her time as an undergraduate at Talladega College, graduate studies in zoology at the University of Michigan, her research and pursuit of a PhD at SIO, and teaching at Hampton. The research undertaken to locate these materials and situate Hall’s presence is a process of working through and with scattered documents and images of a figure whose subjugated history must be uncovered obliquely and with care.
The papers of Hall’s Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Carl Leavitt Hubbs, reveal a chapter of Hall’s story at Scripps, where she became a part-time graduate student in 1945. By 1964, Hall had completed all the requirements for the degree but was denied the opportunity to defend her doctoral thesis. This outcome is brought into sharp relief by Hall’s subsequent achievements at Hampton, including the establishment of the Center for Marine Science and Coastal Environmental Studies in 1981. Notably, the center’s library was launched with support and donations offered by Scripps oceanographer Walter Munk. Since then, Hampton’s program has precipitated the careers of hundreds of Black marine and environmental scientists, including current and recent PhDs from Scripps.
While Hall can be identified as a “first in her field,” the point of gathering and tracking her story is not about essentializing her career or tokenizing her tenure at Scripps. Instead, the history of Hall’s life and work offers a chance to understand better the significant role played by science education, not only as a training domain but also as a set of institutional frameworks through which historically embedded patterns of anti-Blackness recursively impact the scope and structure of scientific research performed in university settings. More, if not most importantly, Ma Hall’s story is one of survivance—emphasizing presence and vitality over historical absence—that asks us to challenge assumptions about how, where, and for whom histories of science and learning are shared, celebrated, and heard.