Leaving a Footprint

One of Irma McClaurin’s (’73) most treasured possessions is a set of slightly tattered volumes of poetry she wrote when she was in second grade.

“My mother saved them,” she says. “I thought they’d been lost.”

The books are more than a personal keepsake — McClaurin says they also illustrate how the bits and pieces of our lives can be historical artifacts worth preserving.

Scholar in Residence

McClaurin spent the month of February — aptly, Black History Month — at Grinnell as a Mellon Foundation Humanities in Action Alumna scholar in residence. Her busy schedule included delivering a Scholars’ Convocation, leading a Community Friday seminar, several in-class presentations, a workshop for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) faculty members, and more.

McClaurin also collaborated with eight student interns to build an archive of the Black Experience at Grinnell. With guidance from McClaurin, the students worked to create a more complete history of Black Grinnellians by researching College archives.

Working alongside McClaurin was a profound experience for Ekta Shaikh ’24. “Observing how she integrates her values into her practice has been incredibly motivating, particularly as an anthropology student,” she says.

Shaikh adds, “As a woman of color at Grinnell, witnessing her unapologetic presence and her ability to provoke introspection through her candid revelations has been immensely empowering.” 

Feminist and Archivist

The Black Experience at Grinnell archiving project is near to McClaurin’s heart. In 2016, she established the Black Feminist Archives at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which includes her own documents and artifacts.

“There is an urgent need to lift up Black women,” McClaurin writes on the UMass archives website. “… I believe this act of preserving Black women’s lives is the responsibility of all of us, if we desire a complete history that will reflect the full range of the events and people who have shaped this country.”

The gaps in our history have consequences. When McClaurin herself was a Grinnell student, she had no idea that Grinnell had a history of support for the abolition of slavery, nor did she know that the town was home to Black families who had lived there for generations, such as the family of Grinnell’s first Black woman graduate, Edith Renfrow Smith ’37.

“How might we have viewed the town of Grinnell differently had we known that there were Black families who had lived here, had we known that the College was connected to the abolitionist movement?” McClaurin asks. “How might I have felt like I had a place here?”

Why Grinnell?

McClaurin grew up in Chicago, where she attended the Lucy Flower Technical High School, an all-girls public vocational high school that was about 98% Black. In 1968, she participated in an Upward Bound college prep program at Yale Summer High School (YSHS). She was one of only 28 women studying alongside more than 100 men. The students represented a diversity of ancestry and cultural backgrounds and came from across the country.

“That gave me exposure to what a college experience might be,” McClaurin says.

She first heard about Grinnell College from Howard Ward ’69, whose mother was the first Black principal of her high school. When making her final college decision, the director of the YSHS program suggested Grinnell. “He described it as the ‘Harvard of the Midwest,’” she remembers. So, she applied and was offered a full-ride scholarship. Although she was wait-listed at Radcliffe and accepted at two other colleges, McClaurin chose Grinnell out of practicality.

“I was very pragmatic at that point,” she says.

Aspiring Grad Student

One of the items in McClaurin’s personal archive is an English paper she wrote as a first-year student at Grinnell. The professor marked it “C+,” and included the following note: “Dear Irma, you have many good ideas, but you’re not graduate school material.”

That comment galvanized McClaurin to prove the professor wrong and to take charge of her own future. She also decided to major in the American Studies, which was then a new interdisciplinary major at Grinnell.

She remembers visiting the Jewel Box bank in downtown Grinnell as part of a class led by the late Professor of History Al Jones ’50. As they stood in the delicate sunlight filtering through the stained-glass windows, she absorbed the beauty of Louis Sullivan’s architecture and awakened to a new way of looking at things.

McClaurin says she recognized that the physical artifacts of our lives — what anthropologists call material culture — have power.

Anthropologist and Educator

This interest in material culture led McClaurin to pursue an M.F.A. in English/creative writing, and a decade later M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As an award-winning writer and recognized anthropologist, Grinnell College presented her with an honorary degree in 2023, one of the highest honors the College can bestow.

McClaurin’s career has included a faculty position at Grinnell, tenured faculty roles at two universities, and the presidency of Shaw University, where she was the first permanent woman president. Her other roles have included Black feminist activist, philanthropist, consultant, a position with the federal government, and chief diversity officer at Teach for America.

Writer and Poet

McClaurin is also a nationally recognized poet who weaves the cadence of poetry into almost everything she writes. “I tell people I was born a poet and I became an anthropologist and an administrator,” McClaurin says. “Poetry is the heart of who I am.”

Her own, often poetic, story is one worth preserving, but so are the stories of the millions of Black women erased from history by a culture that did not value their contributions, McClaurin says.

Leaving a Footprint

“I’m hoping that what I start here, which is documenting and excavating the Black Experience at Grinnell, becomes a real thing that is tangible so that I can say, ‘Well, I helped to get that started. That came out of the work that I was doing as part of on my presence on campus.’ I always try and leave a footprint.

“My whole purpose of being here is to make a difference, have an impact,” McClaurin says. “That’s something I believe in.”