Vera Mae Green
1928-1982

"The lack of understanding of the history of Blacks in the United States...has stimulated the development of a limited conception of the Black experience, past and present" (Bolles and Moses 1988:129).

Selected Works by and about Vera Mae Green

Cole, Johnetta B.
1982  Obituary on Vera Mae Green.  American Anthropologist 84:633-35.

Green, Vera Mae
1970  The Confrontation of Diversity Within the Black Community.  Human Organization 29 (4):267-72.

1974  Migrants in Aruba. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum.

1982  U.S. Blacks: The Creation of an Enduring People? In Persistent Peoples: Cultural Enclaves in Perspective. G. Kushner, and C.P. Castile, eds. Pp. 69-77. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

     Interesting Websites

Applied Anthropology Links

Association of Social Anthropologists

Sources:

Bolles, A. Lynn, and Yolanda T. Moses
1988  Vera Mae Green: 1928-1982.  In Women Anthropologists: A Biographical Dictionary.  Ute Gacs, Aisha Khan, Jerrie McIntyre, Ruth Weinberg, eds.   Pp. 127-132.  New York: Greenwood Press.
Cole, Johnnetta B.
1982  Vera Mae Green.  American Anthropologist 84 (3):633-635.
Expediamaps

Home

Because Vera grew up in Chicago, Illinois among the urban poor, she was able to articulate and understand that there was diversity and variation among so-called poor people.  She won a college scholarship and attended William Penn College, where she studied sociology and psychology. 

After years of working at various social welfare jobs in Chicago, Vera moved to New York to formally begin her study of anthropology at Columbia University.   In 1955 she received her master's degree in anthropology, and began to work in international community development with the United Nations.

Vera continued to work o the diversity of poverty in 1963 when she served as one of Oscar Lewis's research assistants in his study of a poor urban area in Puerto Rico and in New York.  Following this fieldwork, she entered the doctorate program at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she received her Ph.D. in 1969.   Her doctoral fieldwork was carried out on the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba.

Map of Aruba in Caribbean Islands

She was one of the first African American anthropologists to study ethnic relations in the Caribbean (Bolles and Moses 1988).

Vera was very concerned with the issue of international human rights.  Her actions on behalf of human rights contributed significantly to interethnic studies, black family studies, and the study of poverty and the poor.   She served as director of the Mid-Atlantic Council for Latin American Studies, as convener of the Quaker Anthropologists, was active in the Society for Applied Anthropology, and as president of the Association of Black Anthropologists.

In each of these organizations, Vera tried to encourage African Americans and other Third World people to pursue careers in anthropology (Cole 1982).