Nellie McKay - A Memorial

Living a dictum she learned at Harvard - "never enter a fight that you don't intend to win" (Hall 269) - she served UW-Madison for her full career, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in the African American Studies Department as well as in the Women Studies Program and the Department of English, in which she ultimately held a joint appointment as Evjue Bascom Professor of American and African-American Literature. Perhaps our collaboration is at least partly the function of our having taught African American women writers for many years now, and having learned from their writings that, as a group of people almost always situated on the least favorable rung of the social ladder, black women learned (without having to be told explicitly) that survival for each one depended on the entire group's embrace of such strategies as cooperation, dedication to, and collaboration among themselves.