Ann Willcox Seidman (30 April 1926 – 13 August 2019) was an American economist, active in African liberation struggles, and a writer and university professor.
In the 1970s, she successfully sued Brown University for discrimination after it reversed a decision to offer her a named Chair and Professorship.
[3] Seidman published in law and development, planning policy, and dependency theory.
The Economics of Pan-Africanism was a call to re-order African economies under political and economic unification: they were "trying to create a new theory of market integration and a series of policy measures which truly reflected the characteristics and the needs of the African continent, and at the same time could support Nkrumah’s call for continental planning and political union" (Gerardo Serra, 2014)[1] The focus of her work shifted to the use of democratic legislative tools as part of successful economic and political integration for developing countries.
She advocated the use of law to construct institutional change that could redress embedded socio-economic inequalities.
The Seidmans were among several families, including Ann's parents Anita and Henry Willcox, who established one of the first interracial planned communities on the East Coast of the US, at Village Creek in Norwalk, Connecticut in the 1950s, and some of their children were born there.