Dr. Walker is the
founder and director of the Center for Black Business
History, Entrepreneurship and Technology. She
is a professor in the History Department of the
University of Texas at Austin, and has written
numerous books in African American history, including
The History of Black Business in America.
Dr. Juliet E.K. Walker, the founder/director
of the Free Frank New Philadelphia Historic Preservation
Foundation is, the great great granddaughter of Free
Frank. She was born in Chicago and attended DuSable
high school and Roosevelt University, with a BA American
History. She is a University of Chicago Ph.D, who studied
under Dr. John Hope Franklin. Formerly a professor in
the Department of History at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign (1976-2001), Dr. Walker is presently
a professor in the Department of History at the University
of Texas at Austin, where she established the Center
for Black Business History, Entrepreneurship and Technology
(CBBH). She is the Executive Director of the CCBH. Through
her research and publications, Dr. Walker has established
herself as the preeminent authority of Black business
history and entrepreneurship. She has been a Research
Associate at the Harvard University DuBois Institute,
a history fellow at Princeton University and a senior
Fulbright Research and Teaching Fellow in South Africa
at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg,
South Africa (1995-1996). Author of some 90 scholarly
articles, book chapters and encyclopedia entries, Dr.
Walker is also the author of the first and only comprehensive
study of African American business with her book, BLACK
BUSINESS IN AMERICA, CAPITALISM, RACE, ENTREPRENEURSHIP
(New York/London: Macmillan and Prentice Hall, 1998)
and is also editor of the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
AFRICAN AMERICAN BUSINESS HISTORY(Greenwood,1999).
She has won some thirteen awards for her publications.
Dr. Walker's prominence in Black Business history
is reflected the following video, as part of the Thomas
Day Project video entitled: A Conversation
With Dr. Juliet E. K. Walker: The Economic Life of
African Americans in the Age of Slavery
“is a 35-minute video "conversation" with the foremost
authority on the African American business tradition,
Dr. Juliet E. K. Walker.”
In addition to having Free Frank's grave site listed in the National Register of Historic Places, in her continued efforts to generate public interest in the history of black business activity during the age of slavery, in 1990 Dr. Walker retraced Free Frank's route, by walking from Pulaski County, Kentucky to Pike County, Illinois.
