Phyllis A. Wallace
*Phyllis A. Wallace was born on this date in 1921. She was a Black economist and activist.
She was born Annie Rebecca Wallace in Calvert County, Maryland, the first of six children born to John Wallace, a craftsman, and Stevella Wallace. She attended a well-ranked yet segregated high school, Frederick Douglass High School, graduating first in her class in 1939. Because Maryland's state University system was segregated, Wallace studied economics at New York University and received her bachelor's degree in economics in 1943; she earned a master's degree in 1944 and a Ph.D. in 1948.
As a new Ph.D., Phyllis's professional focus was international trade. It was a part-time lecturer at City College of New York and a National Bureau of Economic Research researcher. In 1953, Phyllis taught in the School of Business Administration at Atlanta University while maintaining her research relationship with NBER. In 1957, Phyllis worked at the CIA as an intelligence analyst. 1966, Phyllis became the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission's Chief of Technical Studies. In this job, Phyllis reached out to senior economists and young scholars who would pursue distinguished academic careers.
The most consequential case of her EEOC years, EEOC, Hodgson, and U.S. v. AT&T, involved the employment practices of AT&T's 23 subsidiary operating companies of AT&T. In 1969, after setting the AT&T case in motion, Wallace returned to New York as a vice president at the Metropolitan Applied Research Center to address employment discrimination experienced by urban youth, especially young Black women. Wallace was a visiting professor at MIT in 1972. She retired from active teaching in 1986.
To honor her career and impact, MIT endowed the Phyllis A. Wallace Doctoral Fellows Fund, which supports Black students admitted to the school's doctoral program, and the Phyllis A. Wallace Visiting Scholars Fund, which provides support for Black visiting scholars. Phyllis Wallace, who loved classical music and architecture, died on January 10, 1993.
To become a Financial Management Analyst
To become a Market Research Analyst
