Priscilla Dowden

Dr. Priscilla A. Dowden-White is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri-St. Louis where she currently serves as an undergraduate advisor and teaches a variety of courses on African American history, United States history since 1865, and the history of St. Louis. She holds a B.A. in history from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, an M.P.S. in Africana studies from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and a Ph.D. in history from Indiana University-Bloomington. 

Her scholarly interests include social welfare and civic activism among African Americans during the interwar period of WWI and WWII. Dr. Dowden-White is the author of the recently published book titled Groping toward Democracy: African American Social Welfare Reform in St. Louis, 1910-1949 (University of Missouri Press, 2011). She is currently editing and annotating the unpublished memoir of the urban league executive secretary, John T. Clark, and has recently begun the research for a biography on the life of the late civil rights attorney Margaret Bush Wilson. Prof. Dowden-White has also been a featured scholar in several historical documentaries, among them are:  Sing It, Tell It, a documentary exploring the African-American musical heritage of Missouri, created by Public Interest Films of Berkeley, California; Decades, a series on the history of St. Louis since the 1904 World’s Fair; Made in the U.S.A.: East St. Louis; and The Jewish American Experience. 

A native St. Louisan, Dowden-White was educated in the St. Louis public schools. She is a missionary in the African Methodist Episcopal Church where she is actively engaged in the field of local and global missions. In 2006, she was one of 117 women who traveled to Lusaka, Zambia for a part of the NaMayo Initiative which aims to promote health, economic development, and the healing of women in that country. 

During the fall semester 2007, Prof. Dowden-White served as the co-coordinator of the Missouri Africa Program and as the faculty-in-residence at the University of Ghana-Legon where she taught a course on the African Diaspora. The mother of one adult daughter, Prof. Dowden-White is a proud resident of the City of St. Louis where she resides with her husband and their dog, Spunky.