Annie Shaw-Barnes

Welcome to My Family Website

I am a cultural anthropologist and a specialist and speaker on the topics of education, family, how to improve stepfamilies from stepchildren's perspective, parenting in Inner City America, gangsters' life and what to do about it, black college student romance, the Black American Man, Christian black church, the vanishing sharecropping culture, U.S. military judicial sentencing, and racism. I invite you to browse my website. You can view my photo gallery, read About Me, My Services and Contact information, books and high tier professional journal articles, see my life in a West African tribal society, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and in African tourism culture, and, also, see a partial sample of my audiences, read about my consultant opportunities, speaking topics, my interest in customizing speeches to meet your needs, social media experience, organization positions, awards, and listen to my voice, recorded in 2016. I hope you’ll find it an enjoyable and beneficial experience and like me a lot!

Annie Shaw-Barnes, Ph.D.

Annie Lee Shaw-Barnes was born to Adam Shaw, Jr. and Annie Bell Rutherford Shaw, 1932, in Cohassett, south central Alabama, and they raised her farther south on a sharecropping farm in south central, Alabama. Shaw-Barnes is married to Bennie Mamaduke Barnes and they have a daughter and a granddaughter.

Shaw-Barnes attended Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, as an undergraduate, majored in sociology and minored in American history, and received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1953. Shaw-Barnes subsequently trained as a master’s degree student in sociology at Atlanta University (the oldest Negro graduate institution in America, founded in 1865), Georgia, in the sociology department, and received her master’s degree, completed in August, 1954 and dated January, 1955. From 1897 to 1910, the great Negro intellectual W. E. B. DuBois, while he was chairman of Atlanta University sociology department, made it famous. There, he wrote The Philadelphia Negro, 1998, a community study, and the Souls of Black Folks, 1903, to describe the efforts of Negroes to reconcile their African heritage with their pride in being American citizens.

From 1954 to 1965 Shaw-Barnes taught gifted and talented eleventh graders American history and twelfth graders American government at Huntington High School in Newport News, Virginia, and earned the Distinguished Palmer-Scales Teaching Award for excellent high school teaching. From 1965 to 1978, Shaw-Barnes taught anthropology and sociology at Hampton Institute, Virginia. While teaching at the Institute, Shaw-Barnes introduced Professor Margaret Mead, author of Coming of Age in Samoa and a member of Hampton Institute’s Board of Visitors, for her lecture at Hampton Institute Museum, and earned ten semester university credit hours in race, social, physical, and genetic anthropology in the summer National Science Foundation Institute at the University of Colorado, 1967. There, she was taught by several distinguished anthropology professors, including Professors Leslie White, Alice Brues, C. Loring Brace, David L. Greene, and John Greenway.

A year later, Shaw-Barnes enrolled in the University of Virginia Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Charlottesville, and graduated in 1971, thereby earning her some “firsts” at the University of Virginia. Shaw-Barnes was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. degree in anthropology from the University of Virginia, first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and second African American to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. In 2008, ten graduate students at Georgia State University, Atlanta, in Historic Preservation Course, studied and used her book, The Black Middle Class Family, based on her doctoral research, for documentation, to make application for the geographical area, Collier Heights, the Atlanta area that the author researched, to be placed in the Georgia Historical Department and on the National Historical Preservation Register: the furnishing inventories of the era, 1969 to 1970, that the author collected in Collier Heights, since, she is told, most of the original residents of that era are no longer there, are insightful about their house interiors and, therefore, help preserve Atlanta black middle class culture.

From 1971-1997, Shaw-Barnes was Eminent Professor of Anthropology in Norfolk State University Sociology Department, Virginia. While there, Shaw-Barnes was selected Best Teacher at Norfolk State University, twice, and her classes were full to capacity, still, her students requested and obtained her permission for their friends to hear certain lectures listed on her syllabus, and, at other times, when she completed her lectures and left the classroom, she saw students, who had come to hear her lecture, sitting on the floor, beside her classroom door. Also, Shaw-Barnes was one of the Virginia State Council of Higher Education thirteen Best Teachers of the year in 1988, and the council selected Shaw-Barnes to speak, on behalf of herself and the twelve other 1988 Best Virginia college professors, at the Corporate Banquet honoring the recipients.

Shaw-Barnes has conducted research in the Osudoku Tribal Society in Ghana, West Africa, and across America, especially in the South in inner cities and black middle class communities. Also, with permission of Colonel Joe, Commander at Patrick Air Force Base, and commandant Gregory Lowe commander at the USDB, she conducted research at the United States Disciplinary Barracks, USDB, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Based on her in-depth interviews with white, black, and Hispanic inmates, Patrick Air Force Base published her research as a brochure. While conducting research at the USDB, Shaw-Barnes lived at the Cooke House, where United States generals and colonels live when they have business at Fort Leavenworth, and it is where General Colin Powell stayed, in 1992, two years before Shaw-Barnes did, in 1994, to dedicate the Buffalo Soldiers Black Militiamen Monument. And the author conducted worldwide research about domestic violence in military marriages, with Hal H. Rosen, John P. Sheposh, Joyce Shettel-Dutcher, Jill M. Ralston, and Steve Talley, and the Navy Personnel and Research Development Center, San Diego, CA, published it as a booklet, 1997.

Shaw-Barnes, with permission from her anthropology colleague, Professor Jack R. Rollwagen, State University of New York College at Brockport who was also editor of the Urban Anthropology: and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development international journal, edited a special issue of the journal, Women in the Americas: Relationships, Work and Power, and he published it as Volume l5, Number 3-4, Fall-Winter, l986.

Shaw-Barnes has 20 refereed published articles and they include: “Comparative American Policing” in Droit et Cultures, Special Issue Edited by Professor Carol J. Greenhouse, Legal Anthropology Specialist, Indiana University, Bloomington, Published by the University of Paris, France, Volume 33, Number 1, pp. 97-110, 1997; “Black Women in the Workplace” in Anthropology of Work Review Journal, pp. 4-7, 1989; “Voluntary Association Participation: Churches and Bridge Clubs” in Tennessee Anthropologist, Volume IV, Number 2, 129-139, 1979; “The Osudoku: Kinship, Political, and Ceremonial Systems,” Review of Afro-American Issues and Culture, Volume 2, Number 1, pp. 1-26, 1980; “The Black Kinship system,” Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture, Volume 42 , Number 4, pp. 369-380, 1981, and “Mistresses and Masters and African-American Domestic Workers: Ideals for Change,” Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 66, pp. 22-36, Number 1, 1993.

Shaw-Barnes has read thirteen professional papers in sessions and symposia at the American Anthropology Association (AAA) annual meetings, and was AAA’s Invited Chair for one scholarly session, and organizer of sessions, key symposia, and roundtable discussions.

Shaw-Barnes was invited and accepted the chance to work in the AAA structure. She served on the AAA Board of Directors, as the President of the Association of Black Anthropologists, Chair of Blacks in Education Committee, twice, and member of the National Council of Anthropology and Education, chaired by Professors George and Louise Spindler from Stanford University, California. She was appointed member of the organizing committee of the General Anthropology Division (GAD) of AAA, and, therefore, because of Professor Sylvia Forman, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, she was one of the GAD organizers, and she served on its first board as member at large. In addition, AAA appointed Shaw-Barnes to the national external and administrative advisory committee of its organization.

In the Southern Anthropology Society (SAS), Shaw-Barnes read several papers at professional meetings, including her first, “Illegitimacy in Black Families,” at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI), Blacksburg, 1973, where she gave a lecture on the subject of her paper at VPI’s radio station, and the VPI radio station aired the lecture on twenty-six radio stations. Shaw-Barnes read a paper on black college students’ assessment of Alex Haley’s Roots to a packed SAS annual meeting audience, and she was invited to present two symposia papers, “Single Mothers in Black Colleges,” 1989, and “African American Teen Pregnancy in the South, 1992,” and the Southern Anthropology Society published the symposia at the University of Georgia Press, Athens.

Shaw-Barnes was elected the first African American woman president of the then fifty-seven-year-old Virginia Social Science Association, served on its board, held all the positions in the Virginia Social Science Association, and published an article, “Black Single Fathers: Continuity, Neutrality, and Change” in the Virginia Social Science Journal, 1990.

Shaw-Barnes has reviewed documents for colleges and universities. For example, she reviewed an article for Harvard University's Medical School's Journal, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Social Science and Medicine," 1986, a proposal for The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Murray Research Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000, African American doctoral candidates’ funding proposals for the Ford Foundation New York, New York, 1972.

Also, Shaw-Barnes has served as family consultant about how to curtail the growing number of black unwed mothers for the Rockefeller Foundation, New York, New York, 1980s, Consultant to the Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, Tampa, about How to Get More African American students to attend the university, 1990's, and consultant to the Big Ten Universities in Chicago, Illinois, about ways to help teachers at Historically Black Colleges, 1980.

In 2001, Shaw-Barnes hosted a special series, Moving America Forward, on radio station WALLE 990 AM for the North American Broadcasting Company in New England. Her guests included Dr. Wilton Anderson, Harvard University graduate and former New York City Middle School Principal and authority on American Education, Dr. Jonathan Sarna, Professor and authority on Jewish Religion, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, Mr. J Jay Rodriquez, international radio host, Mr. John L. Horton, Employment and Restoration Coordinator for the Restorative Justice Program at the Norfolk, Virginia Juvenile Court, Mr. Bernard H. Scott, corporate specialist, who spent almost thirty years working in Corporate America and was employed by IBM twenty-six-and-a-half years, and Reverend George Walker Smith, former pastor of Christ United Presbyterian Church, San Diego, California.

Shaw-Barnes has also served as media guest. She appeared on national Tony Brown Journal: she discussed Alex Haley’s Roots in 1979 and Everyday Racism in 2001. Shaw-Barnes was a popular guest on more than 200 radio programs, promoting her book, Everyday Racism, electronically, at radio stations, located from the East coast to Hawaii and from Montreal to Florida, thereby making her a national radio guest.

It was Tony Brown, who put a national media face on the author, while he interviewed her in 1979 and 2001, for the last interview was played on the television station for more than a year.

Mr. John Johnson, owner of JET MAGAZINE and EBONY, put a national print face on Shaw-Barnes. She was featured in JET, a John Johnson publication, 1983, when she served as first African American woman president of Virginia Social Science Association. In 1985, EBONY placed Shaw-Barnes's book, Black Middle Class Family, on its Book Shelf.

In Virginia, Shaw-Barnes has been regular contributor to the daily newspaper, The Virginian-Pilot and the weekly newspaper, The New Journal and Guide, and Hampton Roads television affiliates, ABC, CBS, and NBC, local Public Broadcasting Network, and numerous radio programs, including popular call-in talk shows, usually done in her Norfolk State University office, at her home, at research sites, especially in ghettos and inner cities, and in newsrooms, and they all made Shaw-Barnes into a local expert on black issues.

Shaw-Barnes’s picture was featured on cover of Portfolio Magazine (Hampton Roads, Virginia, l988). Inside the issue, she discussed "Race and Economics: The Dilemma of the Black Middle Class." The cover picture was featured year in television advertisement collage to attract tourists and advertise tourist and resort region, in which she lives, Southampton Roads, Virginia (Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Suffolk, Newport News, and Hampton).

Shaw-Barnes’s lecture audiences included the Moral Rearmament Conference in Caux, Switzerland, Southwestern Bell National Corporation Annual Meeting, St. Louis, Missouri, high schools, colleges and universities, Luncheon Keynote Speaker for National Organization for Women, (NOW) Virginia state meeting with Patricia Ireland (an attorney and feminist who became the ninth president of the National Organization for women, 1991to 2001), teachers’ groups, county-wide school teachers’ opening school meeting session, civic groups, spousal abuse sessions and Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Holiness churches’ Sunday Morning church women services, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Black History Month Celebrations.

In 1995, the International Speakers Platform Association invited and elected Shaw-Barnes to its membership, thereby giving her the credential to speak on platforms, where some of the best speakers lecture, and elsewhere.

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