page_title: Ruth E. Hodge
section_title: Professional life and community service
hierarchical_section_title: Ruth E. Hodge / Professional life and community service
caption_attribution_description: The State Museum of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania State Archives tower (right) in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States
context_page_description: Ruth Evelyn Hodge is an American archivist, author, educator, and community activist who has furthered the advancement of African-American and United States military history research and writing during the 20th and early 21st centuries. “African-Americans played a great part in building America, ” she said during a newspaper interview in 2000. “The more people know, the better they understand and the better they get along.”
context_section_description: From the early 1960s through the early 1990s, Ruth E. Hodge utilized her strategic planning and archival skills to assist the United States Army with the documentation and preservation of its history. While employed in the U.S. Army War College Library (Carlisle Barracks) from 1960 to 1980, she was also a member of the Medical Science Liaison Society at Shippensburg University (1971).
  She was then employed by the U.S. Army Military History Institute (Carlisle Barracks) from 1980 to 1993. During this period of her service, she also served as an Equal Opportunity counselor for her employer, and taught classes at Shippensburg University as an adjunct professor from 1981 to 1982.
  As the U.S. Army prepared to commemorate the 50th anniversary of World War II, she was drafted to help with research, but soon realized that there was scant information “on blacks when it came to Army histories and school textbooks.” After presenting a day-long conference for her colleagues in 1992 to raise awareness about this issue and pressing her superiors to do more, she was given the authority to organize a multi-day conference, which then led to invitations for her to present additional lectures nationwide.
  She also assisted authors with a variety of research queries during her tenure with the U.S. Army, including Robert F. Jefferson, who later thanked Ruth and others from the "United States Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks ... for their generosity and resourcesfulness" via the "Acknowledgements" section of his 2008 book, Fighting for Hope: African American troops of the 93rd Infantry Division in World War II and postwar America.
   Hired by the Pennsylvania State Archives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1993 as an archivist, she became the Archives’ African-American specialist. In 1997, she also became a consultant to the Pennsylvania Military Museum in Boalsburg, and was able to secure grant funds to support the museum's launch of a program to record the oral histories of African-Americans who had served in the U.S. military during World War II. By the following year, she had also joined a steering committee which had been formed to plan special events related to the celebration of Cumberland County's 250th anniversary.
  As the 21st century dawned, she published her book, Guide to African American Resources at the Pennsylvania State Archives. According to news reporter Michael Bupp, Hodge “spent six years digging through 69,000 feet of archived documents to compile” the materials for her book during the summer of 2000. During her research, she confirmed the enrollment of more than 10,000 African-American soldiers who fought for the Union during the American Civil War. Interviewed in 2000, she recalled:
  I found evidence that nearly 20 men from Carlisle served with the 54th Massachusetts Regiment…. It wasn’t until Pennsylvania really got into a tight situation and needed as many troops as possible that Gov. Andrew Curtin noticed the number of blacks heading elsewhere to enlist.
  In 2001, she delivered a lecture on the life and work of Charles Franklin Moss, the early 20th-century Carlisle photographer who reportedly also created the design for Pennsylvania's state flag. The program was presented at the Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church as part of its 133rd anniversary celebrations in November of that year.
  Remaining active during her retirement, she presented a program regarding "Carlisle's African American Civil War Soldiers” at the Bosler Free Library in that city in November 2002 as part of the "One Book, Two Counties" program sponsored by Cumberland and Dauphin counties.
  In 2005, she played a key role in Carlisle's celebration of National African American History Month, helping to coordinate a February program at the Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church with the theme, "The Niagara Movement: Black Protest Reborn 1905-2005” for which Sheila Y. Flemming, dean of the School of Social Sciences and professor of history at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Florida, served as the keynote speaker.
  She also spoke at the 2009 dedi
caption: The State Museum of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania State Archives tower (right) in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, March 2010 (GFDL, CC-BY-SA).
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