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New Philadelphia Illinois Historic Preservation Foundation, Founder and Executive Director, Dr. Juliet E.K. Walker  
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About Us: About Juliet E.K. Walker
Founder & Executive Director

Dr. Walker is the founder and director of the Center for Black Business History, Entrepreneurship and Technology. She is a professor in the History Department of the University of Texas at Austin, and has written numerous books in African American history, including The History of Black Business in America.
Dr. Juliet E.K. Walker, the founder/director of the Free Frank New Philadelphia Historic Preservation Foundation is, the great great granddaughter of Free Frank. She was born in Chicago and attended DuSable high school and Roosevelt University, with a BA American History. She is a University of Chicago Ph.D, who studied under Dr. John Hope Franklin. Formerly a professor in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1976-2001), Dr. Walker is presently a professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she established the Center for Black Business History, Entrepreneurship and Technology (CBBH). She is the Executive Director of the CCBH. Through her research and publications, Dr. Walker has established herself as the preeminent authority of Black business history and entrepreneurship. She has been a Research Associate at the Harvard University DuBois Institute, a history fellow at Princeton University and a senior Fulbright Research and Teaching Fellow in South Africa at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa (1995-1996). Author of some 90 scholarly articles, book chapters and encyclopedia entries, Dr. Walker is also the author of the first and only comprehensive study of African American business with her book, BLACK BUSINESS IN AMERICA, CAPITALISM, RACE, ENTREPRENEURSHIP (New York/London: Macmillan and Prentice Hall, 1998) and is also editor of the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN BUSINESS HISTORY(Greenwood,1999). She has won some thirteen awards for her publications.

Dr. Walker's prominence in Black Business history is reflected the following video, as part of the Thomas Day Project video entitled: A Conversation With Dr. Juliet E. K. Walker: The Economic Life of African Americans in the Age of Slavery “is a 35-minute video "conversation" with the foremost authority on the African American business tradition, Dr. Juliet E. K. Walker.”

In addition to having Free Frank's grave site listed in the National Register of Historic Places, in her continued efforts to generate public interest in the history of black business activity during the age of slavery, in 1990 Dr. Walker retraced Free Frank's route, by walking from Pulaski County, Kentucky to Pike County, Illinois.

 

also see:
Publications By Professor Juliet E. K. Walker
Additional Information On Dr. Juliet E.K. Walker

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