Bettye Collier-Thomas

Bettye Collier-Thomas (born Bettye Marie Collier, February 18, 1941) is a scholar of African-American women's history.

Collier-Thomas was born the second of three children of Joseph Thomas Collier, a business executive and public school teacher, and Katherine (Bishop) Collier, a public school teacher. She attended elementary schools in New York, Georgia, and Florida, and high school in Jamaica, New York. Her family belonged to the black middle class, with professions such as nurse, building subcontractor, and barber represented among her near relatives as well as teacher and businessman. Her great-uncle Frank Richard Veal was an African Methodist Episcopal minister and president of the historically black Allen University (South Carolina) and Paul Quinn College (Texas). She thought that she would go into law, but an 11th grade teacher inspired her to become an historian instead. She hyphenated her name upon marriage to Charles J. Thomas, an educator (now retired) and writer.

Collier-Thomas got her bachelor's degree at Allen University, where she was inducted into the Alpha Kappa Mu National Honor Society (the black Phi Beta Kappa during segregation). She won a Presidential Scholarship to attend Atlanta University, where she got her master's degree. In 1974, supported by a Ford Foundation Fellowship, she became the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. in history from George Washington University.

Between 1966 and 1976, Collier-Thomas held various positions in academia, including serving as a professor and administrator at Howard University and holding faculty positions at Washington Technical Institute and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In 1977 she was hired as a special consultant to the National Endowment for the Humanities, for which she developed the NEH's first program of technical assistance to black museums and historical organizations. That same year, she became the founding executive director of the Bethune Museum and Archives (BMA) in Washington, D.C., which was headquartered in a former private house. In 1982 the BMA was designated a National Historic Site and its name changed to the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site. Today it houses the National Archives for Black Women's History. It opened to the public in 1981, and under her direction, it became a nationally prominent institution.

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