David Charles Dennard

1946 -

David Charles Dennard
David Charles Dennard. Image Source: Daily Reflector

David C. Dennard, the first African American professor of history at ECU, contributed to the ongoing diversification of the faculty and heightened awareness of the Jim Crow past as the campus, region, and nation sought to move forward toward a more egalitarian order. In the course of his thirty-four-year career at ECU, Dennard served most notably as the first African American director of the Institute for Historical and Cultural Research and as one of the founding faculty of the undergraduate program in African and African American Studies and as its first director. He also assumed various leadership roles in community initiatives seeking to improve human relations and advance the cause of social justice, well exemplifying the university’s motto of service.

Dennard’s understanding of Jim Crow history was more than academic. Born in 1946 in Hawkinsville, Georgia, Dennard was raised in the deep South world of segregation. Yet his early years coincided with a moment in history when, with the earlier desegregation of the U. S. Armed Forces and increasing calls from progressives across the spectrum for desegregation of public facilities of all sorts, real change seemed imminent. With the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education ruling, there was little room for doubt that Jim Crow’s days were numbered, but still change came slowly. In the meantime, with the encouragement of his African American teachers, Dennard completed his K-12 education at local black schools and then went on to earn, in 1969, a B.S. in social sciences at Fort Valley State University, widely considered Georgia’s top ranked public HBCU. In 1971, he finished a master’s degree in Afro-American studies-social sciences at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a private, research-focused HBCU at which Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois had taught in the early twentieth century. Between 1971-1974, he took his first teaching position as a history faculty at the recently founded Parkland Community College in Champaign, Illinois. In 1983, Dennard completed a Ph.D. in American history at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

In 1986, after early teaching stints at Parkland College, Paine College, and Fayetteville State University, Dennard joined the ECU History Department faculty. In 1999, then dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Keats Sparrow, appointed Dennard director of the Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, replacing founding director, Henry Ferrell, and thus becoming the first African American head of that institute.

An active and engaged faculty member, Dennard was responsible for organizing and coordinating the first annual, university-wide Martin Luther King commemorative events at ECU, bringing in nationally and locally prominent speakers for campus addresses. At the state level, Dennard served on the Historic Bath Commission, providing professional historical leadership for the oldest town in North Carolina, and as a member of the N.C. Highway Historical Marker Program and as a consultant for the New Bern African American Cultural Trails Project. He is also currently serving on the North Carolina Historical Commission.

Dennard has also served as a member of the executive council for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and as a member of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. He has published numerous articles and essays in the St. James Guide to Biography, Research Guide to American Historical Biography, Journal of Negro History, North Carolina Historical Review, and the Journal of Southern History. In 1992, in recognition of his scholarly contributions and service to the profession, Dennard was inducted into the ECU chapter of Phi Kappa Phi, a national academic honor society.

Dennard was also a key researcher in the “Black Physician Experience in Eastern North Carolina Project,” funded by the North Carolina Humanities Council. This initiative documented, with oral interviews, the lifework of a group of outstanding African American physicians including Dr. Andrew Best of Greenville, Dr. Milton Quigless of Tarboro, Dr. Joe Weaver of Ahoskie, and Dr. John Hannibal of Kinston.

On another count, Dennard interviewed a local businessman and community leader, Denison D. (D. D.) Garrett, Sr. (1915-2001), who served on Greenville’s Good Neighbor Council (later, the Greenville Human Relations Council) promoting social justice and harmony in the community. Dennard’s interviews of these African American leaders, on campus and in the community, documented for posterity their instrumental roles in the social betterment of campus, community, region and the overall state of North Carolina.

Dennard contributed most significantly to the study of ECU history by conducting an oral history interview, in 2008, with Laura Marie Leary Elliot (1945-2013), the first African American undergraduate to enroll at East Carolina. Dennard’s interview with Elliot is an exceptionally invaluable resource for understanding the challenges and achievements of one of East Carolina’s most important pioneers in the history of the desegregation of the campus. Dennard’s own legacy as an educator and academic leader similarly furthered the deconstruction of Jim Crow culture, advancing in its stead a more egalitarian and enlightened vision of East Carolina’s future.

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Citation Information

Title: David Charles Dennard

Author: John A. Tucker, PhD

Date of Publication:7/30/2021

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