Hine-Horne Roundtables

Professor Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy.  

Professor Jones is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020) and Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), winner of the Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Award for the best book in civil rights history, the American Historical Association Littleton-Griswold Prize for the best book in American legal history, and the American Society for Legal History John Phillip Reid book award for the best book in Anglo-American legal history. Professor Jones is also author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (2007) and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press (2015), together with many important articles and essay. 

Professor Jones is a public historian, frequently writing for broader audiences at the Washington Post, the Atlantic, USA Today, Public Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Time, the curatorship of museum exhibitions including “Reframing the Color Line” and “Proclaiming Emancipation” in conjunction with the William L. Clements Library, and museum, film and video productions with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Charles Wright Museum of African American History, PBS, The American Experience, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Netflix, and Arte (France.) 

Professor Jones holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law. Prior to the start of her academic career, she was a public interest litigator in New York City, recognized for her work a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University. 

Professor Jones currently serves as a Co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and on the Executive Board of the Society of American Historians.

Brittney Cooper is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. Dr. Cooper is the author of Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (U of Illinois Press, 2017), winner of the Organization of American Historians Merle Curti Prize for Best Book in U.S. Intellectual History. She is also author of the New York Times Bestselling Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (St. Martin’s Press, 2018). Professor Cooper has been named to The Root 100 multiple times, most recently in 2018. She is a frequent commentator for MSNBC and her work has been featured in the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Washington Post, BET, Essence Magazine, the Root and many other publications.

Tanisha C. Ford is an award-winning writer, cultural critic, historian, and Professor of History at The Graduate Center, CUNY.​ Ford is the author of Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul and Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion, and co-author of Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful. Her scholarship has been published in the Journal of Southern History, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, the Black Scholar, and QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. Ford writes regularly for public audiences–with feature stories, cultural criticism, and profiles in: the Atlantic, the New York Times, Elle, Aperture, Bitch, The Feminist Wire, and the Root. Her research has been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among others. She is currently finishing a new book, tentatively titled​ Fundraising for Black Freedom, which examines how and why black women activists raised millions of dollars for various Black Freedom movement organizations and causes by hosting lavish galas, garden parties, fashion shows, and beauty pageants. 

Dr. SHARON HARLEY is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. She and historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn co-edited and contributed essays in the pioneer anthology, The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978). She edited and contributed to two anthologies Sister Circle: Black Women and Work (Rutgers, 2002) and Women’s Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices (Rutgers, 2008) resulting from two major Ford Foundation grants. She recently published “African American Women and the Right to Vote” in Women and Suffrage (2018) and “I Don’t Pay Those Borders No Mind At All:” Audley E. Moore (“Queen “Mother Moore) – Grassroots Global Traveler and Activist– Reframing Black Nationalist/Pan-Africanist Engagement” in Women and Migrations (2018). 

She has held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars as well as the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center, and the National Humanities Center at the Research Triangle, North Carolina. In 2010, she was awarded the Carter G. Woodson Medallion for Outstanding Scholarship.  

Dr. Harley has delivered papers at professional history and women’s conferences in the U.S. as well as scholarly meetings in South Korea, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Ghana, South Africa, Abu Dhabi, and China. 

Harley is the principal investigator of a recently awarded Mellon Foundation Grant to the University of Maryland for a two-year African/Black Diaspora Research Seminar.  Harley served as Principal Investigator of a Ford Foundation seminar, “Women of Color and Work Research Seminar” (2002-2006) and was Co-Editor/Contributor, The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images, co-Editor/Contributor, Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, and Editor/Contributor, Women’s Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices.” 

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University.   

She is the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, which was published by Cambridge University Press and awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards; as well as, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, which was also published by Cambridge. 

Her third book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide, won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and is also a New York Times Bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Pick, and listed on the Zora List of 100 Best Books by Black Woman Authors since 1850.  

Her most recent book, One Person, No Vote:  How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy, was Long-listed for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Book Award in Non-Fiction.

Her young adult adaptation of White Rage, We are Not Yet Equal was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

In addition to numerous teaching awards, her research has garnered fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, National Humanities Center, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. 

She is a regular contributor to The Guardian and advisor for it yearlong series on voting rights.

Professor Anderson was a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee. She earned her Ph.D. in history from The Ohio State University.

Brett Gadsden is Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Northwestern University and a historian of twentieth century United States and African American history. His first book, Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) chronicles the three-decades-long struggle over segregated schooling in Delaware, a key border state and important site of civil rights activism, education reform, and white reaction. His work has appeared in the Journal of African American History and the Journal of Urban History. He is also the recipient of fellowships and grants from the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Libraries, National Academy of Education, Spencer Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, American Historical Association, Hagley Museum and Library, and Delaware Heritage Commission. His manuscript-in-progress, titled “From Protest to Politics: The Making of a ‘Second Black Cabinet,’” explores the set of historical circumstances that brought African Americans into consultative relationships with presidential candidates and later into key cabinet, sub-cabinet, and other important positions in the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations and opened to them unprecedented access to centers of power in the federal government. 

 

Fredrick C. Harris is currently Dean of Social Science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and will resume his duties as Professor of Political Science at Columbia University on July 1, 2020. Dean Harris also serves as Director of the Center on African American Politics and Society. His area of research is broadly American Politics with a focus on race and politics, political participation, social movements, religion and politics, and political history. 

He is the author of the triple-award winning book Something Within: Religion in African-American Political Activism (1999), which was published by Oxford University Press. The book received the V.O. Key Award for Best Book in Southern Politics, the Best Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the Best Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. He is also the co-editor of a volume of essays on the black church and politics titled Black Churches and Local Politics: Clergy Influence, Organizational Partnerships, and Civic Empowerment (2005), which is co-edited with R. Drew Smith.  

Among his other books are the co-authored Countervailing Forces in African-American Civic Activism, 1973-1994 (2006), which was published by Cambridge University Press. It received the Ralph Bunche Award for Best Book on Cultural Pluralism by the American Political Science Association and the W.E.B. Dubois Book Award by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. His more recent book is Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2012.  Price of the Ticket received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Book Award for Non-Fiction by the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Dean Harris is also co-editor with Cathy Cohen of the the Oxford University book series “Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities.” 

Dean Harris’ academic articles have appeared in a variety of journals, including the Journal of Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, and the Boston University Law Review. His article “Collective Memory and Collective Action during the Civil Rights Movement” (2006), which appeared in the journal Social Movement Studies, received the Mary Parker Follett Award for Best Article published in the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association.  Dean Harris has written essays for the New York Times, The Washington Post, Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Transition, Souls, Society, and the London Review of Books.  He is the creator and host of the podcast “The Dean’s Table,” which explores the life, research, and imagination of social scientists at Columbia University. Dean Harris has been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. and a Visiting Professor at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris. He currently serves as a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Leah Wright Rigueur is Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Her research expertise includes 20th Century United States political and social history and modern African American history, with an emphasis on race, political ideology, the American two-party system, the presidency, and civil rights.

Dr. Rigueur’s award-winning book, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton University Press 2015) covers more than four decades of American political and social history, and examines the ideas and actions of black Republican activists, officials and politicians, from the era of the New Deal to Ronald Reagan’s presidential ascent in 1980. Her work ultimately provides a new understanding of the interaction between African Americans and the Republican Party, and the seemingly incongruous intersection of civil rights and American conservatism. Likewise, her book not only tells an important story about race and the Republican Party, but also expands our understanding of the evolution in opinions and behaviors of everyday African Americans that rejected the GOP on a local, state, and national level, between 1936 and the present day.

At the Kennedy School, Dr. Rigueur’s courses include “Conservatives and Liberals in America,” “Race, Riot and Backlash in the United States,” and “The Civil Rights Movement: Strategy, Leadership, and Policy.” Since the Fall of 2015, Dr. Rigueur has organized the Race and American Politics initiative, a multidisciplinary series of seminars and roundtables co-sponsored by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy.

Dr. Rigueur’s research, writing, and commentary has been featured in numerous outlets including MSNBC, CNN, PBS, NPR, the History Channel, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Politico, the Root, the New Republic, Polity, Federal History, and Souls. During the 2017 – 2018 academic year, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In the Fall of 2018, she was a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

Currently, Dr. Rigueur is working on a book manuscript, Mourning in America: Black Men in a White House that examines race, political ideology, social activism, and corruption in the “age of Ronald Reagan” through a focus on one of the most outrageous scandals in modern American political history: the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) scandal of the 1980s.

Le’Trice Donaldson is an assistant professor of African American and U.S. History at the  University of Wisconsin-Stout. Donaldson is the author of Duty Beyond the Battlefield: African American Soldiers Fight for Racial Uplift, Citizenship, and Manhood, 1870-1920 and A Voyage Through the African American Experience.

She earned her PhD in African American History from the University of Memphis, and a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

Dr.  Donaldson specializes in African American military and gender history during the Post-Civil War era through World War I. The primary focus of Donaldson’s work centers on reshaping the narrative of the Black military experience on how African American men utilized military service for community uplift and community defense.

Dr. Donaldson specializes in African American military and gender history during the Post-Civil War era through World War I. The primary focus of Donaldson’s work centers on reshaping the narrative of the Black military experience on how African American men utilized military service for community uplift and community defense. Professor Donaldson is also interested in the race and religion in the Caribbean and Latin America, U.S. intelligence history, and the Black Atlantic World experience.

 

Dr. Hilary N. Green is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at The University of Alabama. For the 2020-2021 academic year, she is the Vann Professor of Ethics in Society at Davidson University, Davidson, NC. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016) and the creator of the Hallowed Grounds Project (2015 to present).  In addition, she is the co-series editor of Reconstruction Reconsidered, a University of South Carolina Press series, a book review editor for the Journal of North Carolina Association of Historians, and the Digital Editor for Muster, the online blog for the Journal of the Civil War Era. She is currently at work on a second book manuscript examining how everyday African Americans remembered and commemorated the Civil War and co-editing with Kevin Levin a  documentary reader on the Confederate monuments. 

Andre E. Johnson, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies in the Department of Communication and Film at the University of Memphis. He teaches classes in African American Public Address, Rhetoric Race and Religion, Media Studies, Interracial Communication, Rhetoric, and Popular Culture, and Hip Hop Studies. He is currently collecting and editing the works of AME Church Bishop Henry McNeal Turner under the title The Literary Archive of Henry McNeal Turner (Edwin Mellen Press). He has already published the first six volumes, and the seventh one is set for publication in 2020. Additionally, along with his academic titles, he currently serves as Senior Pastor of Gifts of Life Ministries an inner-city church built upon the servant leadership philosophy in Memphis, Tennessee.

Dr. Johnson is the co-author (with Amanda Nell Edgar) of The Struggle Over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. He is also the author of The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition (2012) that won the National Communication Association (NCA) 2013 African American Communication and Culture Division Outstanding Book Award. He is the editor of Urban God Talk: Constructing a Hip Hop Spirituality (2013) and he is also finishing No Future in this Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner which the University Press of Mississippi plans to release in 2020. He also serves as the founder and managing editor of the popular Rhetoric Race and Religion blog hosted on the Patheos family of blogs. He is also the curator and director of the Henry McNeal Turner Project (#HMTProject); a digital archive dedicated to the writings and study of Bishop Turner.

George White Jr. is Associate Professor of History and Chair, Department of History, Philosophy & Anthropology, York College, CUNY.  He has both a JD and PhD and teaches on a wide array of subjects including African American History, the History of Hip Hop Culture, and 20th Century American Diplomatic History.  His monograph Holding the Line: Race, Racism and U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Africa, 1953-1961 was published in 2005 by Rowman & Littlefield.

He has published a number of scholarly articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and book reviews over the years, including “Building a Church in the Army: Chaplain Robert Boston Dokes, Religious Resistance to Racial Segregation, and Black Troops in World War II,” The International Journal of Africana Studies, vol. 20, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2019), pp. 43-65 and “The Color Of Money: Minority Economic History, Identity and Kentucky Into the 21st Century,” Register for the Society of Kentucky History, vol. 114, no. 2 (Spring 2016), pp. 161-187.  He also has either given presentations or chaired sessions at professional gatherings like the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the American Historical Association.

Keneshia Grant, PhD is an associate professor of political science at Howard University. She studies the political impact of Black migration in the United States from 1915 to the present. Keneshia’s first book, The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century (Temple University Press, 2020), describes Black Americans’ movement into the Democratic Party in the 20th century as a function of their migration to northern cities. Keneshia’s current work questions how gentrification and displacement affect civic engagement among Black populations in cities and inner-ring suburbs. Keneshia is a regular media contributor, frequently quoted in national print news outlets and appearing on MSNBC and the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. She is a proud graduate of Florida A&M University and earned her PhD in political science at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Keneshia lives in Washington, DC with her husband Brandon Hogan, JD, PhD.

 

Blair L.M. Kelley is Assistant Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies and International Programs in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson which won the prestigious Letitia Woods Brown Best Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Kelley is currently at work on a new book project called Black Folk: The Promise of the Black Working Class under contract at Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton and Company. 

Active inside the academy and out, Kelley has produced and hosted her own podcast and has been a guest on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes, and the Melissa Harris Perry Show, NPR’s Here and Now, and WUNC’s The State of Things. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBCThink.com, The Root, The Grio, Ebony, Salon, and Jet Magazine. Highlighted as one of the top-tweeting historians by History News Network, Kelley was among the first generation of historians active on twitter. She has been tweeting as @profblmkelley for more than ten years and she has over 40,000 followers. 

Kelley received her B.A. from the University of Virginia in History and African and African American Studies.  She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in History, and graduate certificates in African and African American Studies and Women’s Studies at Duke University. 

Melanye Price is Endowed Professor of Political Science at Prairie View A&M University and principal investigator for their African American Studies Initiative, which is funded by grants and gifts from the Mellon Foundation.  Dr. Price was recently named inaugural director of The Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice. Her research/teaching interests include black politics, public opinion, political rhetoric and social movements. Her most recent book, The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race (NYU, 2016) examines the multiple and strategic ways that President Obama uses race to deflect negative racial attitudes and engage with a large cross-section of voters. Her first book, Dreaming Blackness:  Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion (NYU, 2009) examined contemporary support for Black Nationalism.  Her new project is called “Mountaintop Removal: Martin Luther King, Trump and the Racial Mountain,” which uses MLK’s “Mountaintop Speech” as a lens for understanding the rise of Trump and the 2016 election.

Dr. Price completed her B.A. magna cum laude in geography at Prairie View A&M University and her MA and PhD in political science at The Ohio State University. Before coming to Prairie View, she was an associate professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Rutgers University—New Brunswick.  Professor Price previously taught at Wesleyan University and was an inaugural professor for Wesleyan’s College in Prison Program at Cheshire Correctional Facility, a maximum security men’s prison.  She was also the 2017 Black History Month lecturer for US Embassy in Germany where she lectured at universities and community organizations in Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg and Leipzig. Professor Price did election commentary for the 2016 election season on Philadelphia’s NBC 10. She was also one of the contributors to Stanley Nelson’s documentary, Obama: Through the Fire, which aired on BET. She has also done political commentary for The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, Hartford Courant, Vox, Pacifica and NYC and CT Public Radio.  

Saladin Ambar is associate professor of political science and senior scholar at the Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics. Dr. Ambar is the author of 4 books, including Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era (Oxford University Press, 2014), which was nominated for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for best non-fiction book published by an African American author. His latest book, Reconsidering American Political Thought: A New Identity (Routledge, 2019) is one of the first textbooks to center race and gender in American political thought. Prof. Ambar is currently writing a book on the political history of interracial friendships in America. Stars and Shadows: The Politics of Interracial Friendship from Jefferson to Obama, is due out in 2021. Dr. Ambar has contributed research to a number of journals and media, including CNN, the Smithsonian Channel, the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, Race & Class, and Presidential Studies Quarterly. He lives in Allentown, PA and is the father of 13-year old triplets. 

In Fall 2015, Dr. Peniel E. Joseph joined the University of Texas at Austin as Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. He received a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs as the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values and at the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts. 

Prior to joining the UT faculty, Dr. Joseph was a professor at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where he also founded the school’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy to promote engaged research and scholarship focused on the ways issues of race and democracy impact the lives of global citizens. He received a B.A. from SUNY at Stony Brook and a Ph.D. from Temple University. Dr. Joseph’s career focus has been on what he describes as “Black Power Studies,” which encompasses interdisciplinary fields such as Africana studies, law and society, women’s and ethnic studies, and political science. He is a frequent national commentator on issues of race, democracy and civil rights, and has authored award-winning books Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America and Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama. 

Dr. Joseph’s most recent book, The Sword and The Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. examines the political lives of two social-movement leaders who assumed divergent, but crucially similar roles. Stokely: A Life, has been called the definitive biography of Stokely Carmichael, the man who popularized the phrase “black power” and led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as the SNCC. The recipient of fellowships from Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Ford Foundation, his essays have appeared in The Journal of American History, The Chronicle Review, The New York Times, The Black Scholar, Souls, and American Historical Review. Dr. Joseph is a frequent contributor to Newsweek, TheRoot and Reuters, and, his articles, Op-Eds, and book reviews have been published in newspapers from The Washington Post to The New York Times. Dr. Joseph’s commentary has also been featured on National Public Radio, The Colbert Report, PBS, and MSNBC.

Pero Gaglo Dagbovie is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and Associate Dean in the Graduate School at Michigan State University. He is the author of six books; a historic resource study for the National Park Service; and numerous articles and essays. His most recent book was published by Verso Books in November of 2018. It is entitled: Reclaiming the Black Past: The Use and Misuse of African American History in the Twenty-First Century. A lifetime member of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, he is the Editor of The Journal of African American History, the oldest and leading journal devoted to scholarship on African American history. He is also on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, including The Journal for the Study of Radicalism, The Journal of Black Studies, Modern American History, and The Michigan Historical Review. Active in public history, he served as a scholar consultant for the permanent exhibit, “And Still We Rise: Our Journey through African American History and Culture,” at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan. Under the auspices of the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National Capital Region, and the Organization of American Historians, he served as the principal investigator for the Carter G. Woodson Home, National Historic Site and authored the historic resource study for the Woodson Home. He is currently serving as the “subject matter expert” for the restoration project of the Woodson Home. He has participated in and lead numerous “teaching history” workshops and summer institutes for secondary school history teachers supported by the U.S. Department of Education, the Michigan Department of Education, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Dr. Dagbovie actively mentors graduate students.  During the 2018-2019 academic year, he was a member of the Michigan State University Presidential Search Committee and was a Fellow in the Big Ten Alliance Academic Leadership Program. For more than a decade, he has been actively involved in various university diversity and research excellence initiatives. He is currently the Michigan State University National Steering Committee representative for the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society that was founded at Yale University. In April 2019 at the 16th Annual Yale Bouchet Conference on Diversity and Graduate Education, Dagbovie delivered the “Opening Plenary Presentation” that addressed the theme of the 2019 conference.

Dr. Yohuru Williams is Distinguished University Chair and Professor and founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St.  Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dr. Williams received his Ph.D. from Howard University in 1998.

Dr. Williams has held a variety of administrative posts both within and outside the university including serving as Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Fairfield University, Vice President for Public Education and Research at the Jackie Robinson Foundation in New York City, and Chief Historian for the Jackie Robinson Foundation.

Dr. Williams is the author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven (Blackwell, 2006), Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement (Routledge, 2015), and Teaching beyond the Textbook: Six Investigative Strategies (Corwin Press, 2008) and the editor of A Constant Struggle: African-American History from 1865 to the Present Documents and Essays (Kendall Hunt, 2002). He is the co-editor of The Black Panthers: Portraits of an Unfinished Revolution (Nation Books, 2016), In Search of the Black Panther Party, New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement (Duke, 2006), and Liberated Territory: Toward a Local History of the Black Panther Party (Duke, 2008). He also served as general editor for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s 2002 and 2003 Black History Month publications, The Color Line Revisited (Tapestry Press, 2002) and The Souls of Black Folks: Centennial Reflections (Africa World Press, 2003). Dr. Williams served as an advisor on the popular civil rights reader Putting the Movement Back into teaching Civil Rights.

Dr. Williams has appeared on a variety of local and national radio and television programs most notably Aljazeera America, BET, CSPAN, EBRU Today, Fox Business News, Fresh Outlook, Huff Post Live, and NPR and was featured in the Ken Burns PBS Documentary Jackie Robinson and the Stanley Nelson PBS Documentary: The Black Panthers. He is also one of the hosts of the History Channel’s Web show Sound Smart.  A regular political commentator on the Cliff Kelly Show on WVON, Chicago, Dr. Williams also blogs regularly for the Huffington Post and is a contributor to the Progressive Magazine.

Dr. Williams’s scholarly articles have appeared in the American Bar Association’s Insights on Law and Society, The Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, The Black Scholar, The Journal of Black Studies, Pennsylvania History, Delaware History, the Journal of Civil and Human Rights and the Black History Bulletin. Dr. Williams is also presently finishing a new book entitled In the Shadow of the Whipping Post: Lynching, Capital Punishment, and Jim Crow Justice in Delaware 1865-1965 under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Brandon K. Winford is an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a historian of late nineteenth and twentieth century United States and African American history. His areas of specialization are civil rights and black business history. He regularly offers courses on the 1960s in America, the History of the Civil Rights Movement, African American Business History, and Classic and Contemporary Readings in African American History. Winford is the author of John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights (University Press of Kentucky, 2020). He is from Mooresville, North Carolina and received his B.A. and M.A. in history from North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina, as well as his Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Winford is the cofounder of the Fleming-Morrow Endowment in African American History, named in honor of two pioneer black professors in the UTK College of Arts and Sciences and Department of History. It provides funding for an annual lecture and student prizes in the fields of civil rights and military history. Winford is the recipient of the 2019 Junior Diversity Leadership Award from the UTK College of Arts and Sciences and the 2020 Hardy Liston, Jr. Symbol of Hope Award.

John Hervey Wheeler combines black business and civil rights history to explain how economic concerns shaped the goals and objectives of the black freedom struggle. It received one of the 2020 Lillian Smith Book Awards presented by the UGA Libraries, the Southern Regional Council, the Georgia Center for the Book at the DeKalb Public Library and Piedmont College. The book focuses on the black business activism of banker and civil rights lawyer John Hervey Wheeler (1908-1978). Wheeler graduated from Morehouse College in 1929, and then moved to Durham, North Carolina where he landed a job as a bank teller with the Mechanics and Farmers Bank (M&F Bank), one of the nation’s largest black-owned banks. In 1952, he became president of M&F Bank, a sister institution to the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (N.C. Mutual). Between the 1950s and 1960s, Wheeler was the Tar Heel State’s most influential black power broker and among the top civil rights figures in the South. John Hervey Wheeler examines one of the leading black businesspeople in the United States in one of the country’s most well-known Black Wall Streets.

Winford is currently working on a second book manuscript, provisionally titled A History of Black Banking in the American South Since 1865. In the decades after Emancipation, the majority of these financial institutions opened in the American South. They represented an important feature in black economic life, particularly after the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The Great Depression, however, forced all but a handful of black banks into insolvency. A History of Black Banking provides a comprehensive social, political, and economic history of black banks in the region with rich details about the men and women bankers, board members, managers, employees, customers, examiners, and politicians responsible for their existence. Because the depression had such a devastating economic impact on the survival of black-owned banks, they have been overlooked while the primary focus has been on their failures when compared to their white counterparts. Nevertheless, black banking institutions became critical arteries wherever they existed in black communities across the country. They were valuable resources because they facilitated homeownership, consumerism, and entrepreneurship so black people could participate in areas of the economy preciously closed off to them. 

Charles W. McKinney, Jr. is The Neville Frierson Bryan Chair of Africana Studies and an Associate Professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis. His areas of expertise are the Civil Rights/Black Power Era, African American Activism, and African American Politics. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from Morehouse College and completed his doctoral studies at Duke University. His first book was titled Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina. His second project, co-edited with Aram Goudsouzian, is An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee. He is currently working on two projects, the first is tentatively titled Losing the Party of Lincoln: George Washington Lee and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Memphis, Tennessee; the second one, co-edited with Shirletta Kinchen and Francoise Hamlin, is titled Rights and Lives: An Exploration of the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Movement. Rights and Lives is under contract with Vanderbilt University Press.

Shennette Garrett-Scott is an associate professor of history and African American studies. She is author of the award-wining Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal and a forthcoming book about the National Negro Business League

 

Pero Gaglo Dagbovie is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and Associate Dean in the Graduate School at Michigan State University. He is the author of six books; a historic resource study for the National Park Service; and numerous articles and essays. His most recent book was published by Verso Books in November of 2018. It is entitled: Reclaiming the Black Past: The Use and Misuse of African American History in the Twenty-First Century. A lifetime member of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, he is the Editor of The Journal of African American History, the oldest and leading journal devoted to scholarship on African American history. He is also on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, including The Journal for the Study of Radicalism, The Journal of Black Studies, Modern American History, and The Michigan Historical Review. Active in public history, he served as a scholar consultant for the permanent exhibit, “And Still We Rise: Our Journey through African American History and Culture,” at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan. Under the auspices of the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National Capital Region, and the Organization of American Historians, he served as the principal investigator for the Carter G. Woodson Home, National Historic Site and authored the historic resource study for the Woodson Home. He is currently serving as the “subject matter expert” for the restoration project of the Woodson Home. He has participated in and lead numerous “teaching history” workshops and summer institutes for secondary school history teachers supported by the U.S. Department of Education, the Michigan Department of Education, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Dr. Dagbovie actively mentors graduate students.  During the 2018-2019 academic year, he was a member of the Michigan State University Presidential Search Committee and was a Fellow in the Big Ten Alliance Academic Leadership Program. For more than a decade, he has been actively involved in various university diversity and research excellence initiatives. He is currently the Michigan State University National Steering Committee representative for the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society that was founded at Yale University. In April 2019 at the 16th Annual Yale Bouchet Conference on Diversity and Graduate Education, Dagbovie delivered the “Opening Plenary Presentation” that addressed the theme of the 2019 conference.