Directors, Scholars, and Veterans – The Civil Rights Movement: Grass Roots Perspectives

Co-Directors

Judy Richardson was on the staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Georgia, Miss. and Lowndes Co., Alabama (1963-66) and ran the office for Julian Bond’s successful first campaign for the Georgia House of Representatives. Her SNCC involvement has always been a strong influence: in her documentary film work for broadcast and museums (including the award-winning 14-hour PBS series Eyes On The Prize, PBS’ Malcolm X: Make It Plain, and all the videos for the Little Rock 9 National Park Service Visitor Center); and in the writing, lecturing and workshops she conducts on the history and relevance of the Civil Rights Movement.

Richardson was a co-founder of Drum & Spear Bookstore (Washington, DC), once the largest African American bookstore in the country, and worked for a variety of social justice organizations. She also co-edited Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, which includes the narratives of 52 SNCC women. She is on the board of the SNCC Legacy Project, which is engaged in long-term collaborations to further SNCC’s legacy and continuing work on contemporary issues. These include discussions with activists from the Movement for Black Lives; a four-year collaboration with Duke University on an on-going website about SNCC’s voting rights and other social justice organizing work; and continuing work on voting rights issues. Her work with the website project includes regular residencies at Duke as a visiting activist scholar. She has an honorary Doctorate from Swarthmore College and was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Brown University.

Wesley Hogan is the director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, where she teaches the history of youth social movements, African American history, women’s history, and oral history. She is a research professor at the university’s Franklin Humanities Institute and Department of History. Formerly, Hogan taught at Virginia State University, where she codirected the Institute for the Study of Race Relations. Her book on SNCC, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (2007), won the Lillian Smith Book Award, among other honors, and she is currently working on a post-1960s history of young people organizing in the spirit of Ella Baker. Since 2013, Hogan has co-facilitated a partnership between the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University, culminating in the recent full launch of the SNCC Digital Gateway, whose purpose is to bring the grassroots stories of the civil rights movement to a much wider public.

Scholars

	Daphne Chamberlain is Associate Provost / Vice President for Academic Affairs and Associate Professor of History at Tougaloo College. She has been instrumental in establishing Tougaloo’s Institute for Social Justice and was the founding Director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) Civil Rights Education Center at Jackson State University. Chamberlain has served as a scholar-consultant to several civil rights history projects and in the planning of the 50th anniversary events commemorating the Freedom Rides, the Tougaloo Nine, the assassination of Medgar Wiley Evers, and the Mississippi Summer Project (i.e., Freedom Summer). Read more.
	Charles E. Cobb Jr. is a former field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a journalist, and the author of a number of books including Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project (with Robert Moses, Beacon Press, 2001), On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail (Alonguin Books, 2008), and This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books, 2014). Cobb was the first Black staff writer employed by National Geographic and was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2018 to work on a book about today’s Movement for Black Lives. Read more.
	Emilye Crosby, a member of SUNY Geneseo’s History Department since 1995, has written A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi and edited Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement. She has received numerous awards–for her teaching, scholarship, and service. These include the Chancellor’s Award for Teaching, the Harter Mentoring Award, the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service, and the President’s Award for Research and Creativity. Her first book, A Little Taste of Freedom, won the McLemore Prize and was awarded an honorable mention for the Organization of American Historians’ Liberty Legacy Prize. She is a founding member of the Movement History Initiative, which created the SNCC Digital Gateway (snccdigital.org) and is currently working on the Mellon Foundation-funded project, “Our Story. Our Terms: Documenting Movement Building from the Inside Out,” which was developed to document the ways “today’s activists built their social and political movements.” She is currently working on a booklength project about women and gender in SNCC.
	Ashley D. Farmer is a historian of black women’s history, intellectual history, and radical politics. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Departments of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her book, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (UNC Press, 2017), is the first comprehensive study of black women’s intellectual production and activism in the Black Power era. She is also the co-editor of New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (NUP Press, 2018), an anthology that examines four central themes within the black intellectual tradition: black internationalism, religion and spirituality, racial politics and struggles for social justice, and black radicalism.
	John Gartrell is the director of the John Hope Franklin Research Center at Rubenstein Library. He also serves on the Editorial Board of the SNCC Digital Gateway Project.
	Hasan Kwame Jeffries is associate professor of History at The Ohio State University where he teaches courses on the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement. He earned a PhD in American history with a specialization in African American history in 2002 from Duke University. Hasan is the author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (NYU Press, 2009). He is also the editor of Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), a collection of essays by leading civil rights scholars and teachers on how to teach the Civil Rights Movement. Hasan has worked on several public history projects including the five-year, $25 million renovation of the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. He also hosts the podcast Teaching Hard History for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
	Adriane Lentz-Smith is an historian of the Black freedom struggle and modern U. S. history. She is Associate Professor of History and African & African-American Studies at Duke University and Associate Chair of Duke’s history department. The author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Harvard, 2009), she is currently writing a book, The Slow Death of Sagon Penn: State Violence and the Twilight of Civil Rights, about one man’s deadly encounter with the police in late-Cold-War San Diego. Lentz-Smith’s work has been featured in documentaries on World War I, the Jazz Ambassadors, and the singer Marion Anderson, and most recently in WNYC’s “Blindspot: Tulsa Burning,” on the 1921 racial massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She holds a BA in History from Harvard-Radcliffe and a PhD in History from Yale University.
	Charles M. Payne is the Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Rutgers University Newark and the Director of the Joseph Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Research. His research and teaching interests include urban education and school reform, social inequality, social change and modern African American history, particularly the Black Freedom Struggle. His books include So Much Reform, So Little Change, (Harvard Education Publishing Group, 2008) which examines the persistence of failure in urban schools, and a co-edited anthology, Teach Freedom: The African American Tradition of Education For Liberation (Teachers College Press, 2008), which is concerned with education as a tool for liberation from Reconstruction through Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools. He is also the author of Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure In Urban Education(Greenwood Publishing, 1984) and I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (1995). Read more.
	Jeanne Theoharis is the author or co-author of eleven books and numerous articles on the civil rights and Black Power movements, the politics of race and education, social welfare and civil rights in post-9/11 America. Her biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks won a 2014 NAACP Image Award, the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians, and was named one of the 25 Best Academic Titles of 2013 by Choice. Her book A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History won the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, The Nation, The Atlantic, Slate, Salon, the Intercept, the Boston Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
	Nsé Ufot is the Chief Executive Officer of the New Georgia Project (NGP) and its affiliate, New Georgia Project Action Fund (NGP AF). Nsé leads both organizations with a data-informed approach and a commitment to developing tools that leverage technology with the goal of making it easier for every voter to engage in every election. Nsé and her team are also developing Georgia’s home-grown talent by training and organizing local activists across the state. She has dedicated her life and career to working on civil, human and workers’ rights issues and leads two organizations whose complementary aim is to strengthen Georgia’s democracy. Under Nsé’s leadership, NGP has registered over 500K eligible Georgians to vote and has no plans of slowing down.
	Jenice L. View is an associate professor in the Transformative Teaching program at George Mason University. She is the co-editor of Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching and Why Public Schools? Voices from the United States and Canada. For more than 25 years, View has worked with a variety of educational and nongovernmental organizations, including a D.C. public charter school, the Just Transition Alliance, Rural Coalition, the Association for Community Based Education, and LISTEN, Inc. to create space for the voices that are often excluded from public policy considerations: women, people of color, poor urban and rural community residents, and especially youth. She has a B.A. from Syracuse University, an MPA-URP from Princeton, and a Ph.D. from the Union Institute and University.

Veterans

Courtland Cox became a member of NAG and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) while a Howard University student. He worked with SNCC in Mississippi and Lowndes County, Alabama, was the Program Secretary for SNCC in 1962, and was the SNCC representative to the War Crimes Tribunal organized by Bertram Russell. In 1963 he served as the SNCC representative on the Steering Committee for the March on Washington. In 1973 Mr. Cox served as the Secretary General of the Sixth Pan-African Congress and international meeting of African people in Tanzania. He co-owned and managed the Drum and Spear bookstore and Drum and Spear Press. Cox is presently a Consultant with the D.C. Public Schools. Cox was appointed by President Clinton to serve as the Director of the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) at the Department of Commerce, a position he held until January 20, 2001. Read more.

Jennifer Lawson first marched for civil rights as a teenager in 1963. She attended Tuskegee University and left to work full-time with SNCC in Lowndes County, Alabama. She continued her civil rights work for several years before becoming an executive and producer in public television where she served as head of PBS programming and received numerous awards. She currently works with the SNCC Legacy Project to preserve the history of the movement and to encourage young activists to document their stories. For more information, see SNCC Digital and the History Makers.

Curriculum Coordinators

Deborah Menkart is executive director of Teaching for Change, co-director of the Zinn Educator Project, and co-editor of Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching.

Ursula Wolfe-Rocca is a high school teacher and the Zinn Education Project curriculum writer and teacher organizer. Ursula has written lessons on COINTELPRO, redlining, reparations, the Depression-era deportations of Mexican Americans, Standing Rock, and more. Read more. Ursula will work with the participants both during and after the institute to develop lessons based on the institute themes for their respective grade level and subjects.