User:Bwyche

This is Bwyche. I was born and raised in a small city called Hopewell, VA. I now live nearby after coming home in 2003 to take care of my mother who recently died. During this time I began to look at and then edit articles in Wikipedia. A college teacher who wanted to also combine teaching with research and writing, I would steal time to edit Wikipedia articles either on my research interests or on my other subjects of interest,some of which appear in the paragraphs below.

I was raised during a time of segregation, and participated in the integration of schools in my hometown. This gave me a chance to compare and contrast the two previously segregated communities and their educational systems. Thereafter I was educated predominantly in historically white institutions, despite my complaints and requests to my father in particular to return to historically black colleges and universities.

During this time though I decided that I would spend my teaching career at historically black institutions. And my decision became somewhat a reality. I started teaching about ten miles from where I was born and raised, and at the university I wanted to attend before integration took me out of the segregated world I had been born in. At this historically black college my students surprised me when they asked me the same questions I had earlier asked my professors. My professors had told me, or acted as if, such questions were unworthy of their attention. My attempt to respond to them --or their demands that I do so -- informed my dissertation which I completed years later. There I was impressed to find that this historically black college's first president was black,that it had a board of trustees with one white member, a black faculty in both the normal school and the college, and that its first full time white faculty member taught in the 1960s. Before I had only been aware of HBCUs where blacks struggled to become the first black president and so on. Much later I became aware of a biracial group in Virginia named the Readjusters who participated in a debt controversy in Virginia against their rivals, the Funders, the Debt Payers and the Bourbons. The latter party changed its name to the Democratic party in 1881. This biracial party is the most important of the little known biracial parties and organizations that emerged in the South after the Civil war and during Reconstruction.

Since that teaching job, I have taught mainly at various historically black colleges, sometimes as an adjunct. Twice I worked at historically white colleges, as a teaching fellow and an adjunct.

Other jobs --

directing and coordinating federal grants

training police officers dealing with domestic violence, workers dealing with rodent control, lead abatement,the provision of infant car seats; student interviewers, and physicians/medical examiners, nurses, and other personnel in hospitals, nursing and funeral homes, health departments and other providers of information on death certificates - Until today I am interested in computerizing the death certificate, health statistics, and in vital events reporting ,

conducting research on small farmers in Africa (Kenya) and Virginia, on communities especially small industrial ones like Hopewell, the Enlightenment (my advisor was French) recently,the radical Enlightenment; the applicability of the tradition vs. modernity dichotomy here and overseas - the topic of my dissertation; rhetoric, especially epideictic or praise and blame, praise and blame history and historiography, the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns; sociology i.e, Comte, Simmel, and African American sociologists-- my first choice of a topic for my dissertation, Zora Neale Hurston-- I love her-- Adam Smith, Charles Dunoyer, Alexander Hamilton and revolutionaries, Constitution framers and founders in Americaand Sieyes in France; HBCUs, inventions, patents, intellectual and biological property, HeLa and Henrietta Lacks, 2007 celebration,healthy eating and living (which I do not do), the 1960s ( I like the book, Don't Shoot We Are Your Children), the Anglo Saxon germ theory, historically black institutions, Johns Hopkins, and the institutions he founded, and silences in the literature on them there and elsewhere. So much of this is related. So are my recent interests in the REadjusters and debt or the Age of Debt and the Readjusters' and the founders' and Sieyes' role in it.

After high school I wanted to major in trivia, walk in the rain, swing in swings, feel the warmth of the sun on my face and body, read books with my thirteen children until I met Imo Shango. I think it means God of Thunder and all Knowledge and we talked about Camus, existentialism, Africa, black folks and their history. He played the iboe, and the boring game of golf. I played the clarinet, and preferred styling at the golf course. Saw with him God Forgives I Don't and They Shoot Horses Don't They at the African American theater, the Hippodrome. I retired from teaching on August 15, 2015Bwyche (talk) 11:44, 26 February 2016 (UTC)BWyche