Bernadette Pruitt

Detroit, Michigan, native Bernadette Pruitt is associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University, where she has been a member of the Department of History since 1996, first as a lecturer and then as a tenure-track and tenured instructor. The first Black woman to earn a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in History at the University of Houston, she obtained her undergraduate and master’s degrees from Texas Southern University, a Historically Black College/University (HBCU) in Houston, Texas. Her monograph, The Other Great Migration: The Movement of Rural African Americans to Houston, 1900-1941 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013), examines Black internal migration and community building in what ultimately becomes the fourth largest city in the United States. Pruitt's book is one of the first scholarly attempts to address the Great Migrations to a southern city. New projects include works that address the experiences of Black women historians in Texas, the historiography of Black Houston, World War II and the Second Great Migration to Texas cities, and the Houston Riot or Mutiny of 1917. The scholar has won several awards including the Ottis Lock Superior Book Award with the East Texas Historical Association, Ima Hogg Research Award with the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas, University of Houston African American Studies Dissertation Fellowship, the Fred White Jr. and Mary M. Hughes Research Fellowships in Texas History with the Texas State Historical Association, and Huggins-Quarles Award with the Organization of American Historians. She advises two student organizations: the Sigma Phi chapter of Phi Alpha Theta National History Honor Society, and the university's Kappa Mu chapter of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority. She holds memberships in both. The historian also holds memberships in other organizations—professional and perfect. She is a member of Greater Zion Missionary Baptist Church. Prof. Pruitt lives in Huntsville with her mother and cousin.