La Francis Rodgers-Rose
*La Francis Rodgers-Rose was born on July 19, 1936. She was a Black sociologist and Educator.
La Francis Rodgers-Rose was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and grew up in segregated Portsmouth, Virginia, with her mother, two older brothers, and younger sister. She graduated from Morgan State University with honors in sociology and anthropology in 1958, the year the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the commencement address. She later graduated from Fisk University and earned her PhD in social psychology from the University of Iowa.
Dr. La Francis Rodgers-Rose began teaching in 1964 and held many teaching positions until 1972, when she left to take up a position at Educational Testing Services in Princeton, New Jersey. She returned to teaching a year later and had over 30 years of teaching experience. Rodgers-Rose taught African American Studies at Princeton University for 16 years and has taught at Case Western Reserve University, Rutgers University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Drew University.
Rodgers-Rose authored The Black Woman in 1980, the first textbook in the social sciences to present the perspectives of Black women. In this book, she highlights that although Black women participate in the labor market at higher rates, the jobs they occupy are more likely to be less secure, have fewer benefits, and pay less than those held by white women. She is the founder and CEO of the International Black Women's Congress, a nonprofit organization for women of African ancestry, which she founded in 1983 in Newark, New Jersey. It aims to surface social, political, and economic empowerment in a global community of Black women.
In 2017, she received a Malcolm X Black Unity Award from the Organization of Black Unity in the UK. After suffering from congestive heart failure, Rodgers-Rose had a heart transplant at age 65. She was an advocate for health and organ donation in the African-American community. Described as one of the pioneering Black women sociologists, La Francis Rodgers-Rose passed away on November 10, 2024.
