Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb collection

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 

Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb (1920-1997) was born in Berlin to a secular Jewish family and immigrated to the United States in 1936 with her mother. In 1984, she joined Carla Borden to work on a follow-up project to Borden’s The Muses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation, 1930-1945, with support from the Smithsonian Office of Interdisciplinary Studies. The project investigated refugee scholars from Nazi Germany and Austria who taught at historically black colleges in America and their experiences escaping anti-Semitism in Europe and confronting racism in the United States. Edgcomb continued the project in 1988 under the auspices of the German Historical Institute, and her resulting book, From Swastika to Jim Crow: Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges, was published in 1993. 

Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb collection 

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The Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb collection consist of files documenting Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb’s project to document refugees from Nazi‐occupied Europe in the 1930s and 1940s who were hired by traditionally black colleges and universities in the United States; research files about those colleges, universities, and refugee scholars; and general research files about refugee scholars, traditionally black colleges, anti‐Semitism in Nazi‐occupied Europe, racism in the United States, and the aid organizations, primarily the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced European Scholars, that helped refugee scholars find academic positions in the United States. College and university files contain correspondence, notes, clippings, and photocopies of primary and secondary source material regarding the colleges and universities in Edgcomb’s study, the refugee scholars they employed, and the aid agencies that helped facilitate placement. Sources of primary materials include Rockefeller Archive Center, New York Public Library, and the Moorland‐Spingarn Research Center. General research materials primarily consist of photocopies of secondary source material on topics such as historically black colleges and universities, European refugee scholars in America, slavery and racism in American, and anti‐Semitism in Germany. These files also include photocopies of primary source materials from the Rockefeller Archive Center and other repositories. Project history materials include project descriptions, miscellaneous project correspondence, and correspondence documenting Edgcomb’s and the German Historical Society’s efforts to find a publisher for Edgcomb’s manuscript. 

The Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb collection is arranged as three series: I. Colleges and universities, 1973-1992, II. General research, 1980s, III. Project history, 1984-1992