Danielle Phillips-Cunningham

"A Third of Your Life" SMLR Podcast Episode
Quakertown: A Juneteenth Labor Story 

Formerly enslaved Black Americans established their own community in Denton, Texas in the late 1800s. It grew into a socially vibrant, economically prosperous town. SMLR's Danielle Phillips-Cunningham talks to Alma Clark and Dianne Randolph, who are working to preserve the town’s history.

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Learn more through this two-part Washington Post article about Quakertown:

• Juneteenth started in Texas. So did this Black town. Whites destroyed it. 
• White racism brought down a Black community. Will there be reparations?

Dr. Danielle Phillips-Cunningham is an associate professor in the Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations. Her areas of expertise include women’s labor and migration histories, feminist/womanist theories and research methods, and Black American women’s history.

She is the recipient of the National Women’s Studies Association’s Sara A. Whaley Book Prize for Putting Their Hands on Race: Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers (Rutgers University Press, 2020). Putting Their Hands on Race is a comparative and intersectional labor history of Irish immigrant and southern Black domestic workers who labored in white American households in U.S. northeastern cities.

Dr. Phillips-Cunningham’s writings about Irish immigrant and Black American domestic workers have been published by Signs: The Journal of Women and Culture in Society, the Women’s History Review, and the Routledge History of Irish America.

Her book Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Tower of Strength in the Labor World (Georgetown University Press, 2025) is a Black feminist labor biography of educator and civil, women’s, and labor rights leader Nannie Helen Burroughs. Dr. Phillips-Cunningham’s research for her book was supported by the African American Intellectual History Society C.L.R. James Fellowship Award and an American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant.

Nannie Helen Burroughs was a finalist for the 2025 Association of Black Women Historians’ Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize. Dr. Phillips-Cunningham’s articles about Burroughs were published by interdisciplinary journals and public platforms including The Washington Post, Good Authority, Power at Work, and the Library of Congress.

Further extending her scholarship into the public realm, Dr. Phillips-Cunningham is involved in multiple public history projects. As a co-investigator of “Quakertown Stories,” a Texas curriculum project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, she co-authored op-eds with descendants of Quakertown. Quakertown was a Black town established by former slaves in Denton, Texas after Juneteenth.

Dr. Phillips-Cunningham is a history consultant for the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage’s “Transcending Thresholds” project at the Cliveden Museum in Germantown, Pennsylvania. She is conducting archival research about Irish immigrant and Black American domestic workers at Cliveden. Her research will be used to redesign the Cliveden museum’s domestic worker and slavery exhibits.

In 2025, she co-founded the Nannie Helen Burroughs Preservation Association. The association is a national network of community leaders, preservationists, theologians, educators, artists, and documentarians committed to researching and amplifying Nannie Helen Burroughs’ and other Black women’s history in labor and education.

In December 2025, Washington, D.C.’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission (Ward 2F) approved the Association’s proposal to install a historical marker in honor of Burroughs’ National Association of Wage Earners. In May 2026, the Association will hold the inaugural Nannie Helen Burroughs Conference in Washington, D.C. and the second Nannie Helen Burroughs Parade.

Integrating her expertise into her curriculum building work, Dr. Phillips-Cunningham developed a B.A. program in Women’s and Gender Studies with concentrations in Community Leadership and Health. She also co-teaches Demanding Justice Then and Now: Race, Gender, and Labor with her SMLR colleague Sheri Davis-Faulkner. Their annual course is the first cross-listed course between Rutgers University, Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy, and a Black labor organization (Advancing Black Strategists Initiative).