Mr. Julian Kenneth Braxton holds the inaugural Bezan Chair for Community and Inclusion at the Winsor School in Boston, Massachusetts. With over 25 years of experience as a history educator and senior administrator in independent schools, Julian brings a wealth of knowledge to his role. He has been recognized with many prestigious awards, including the Virginia Wing Outstanding Teacher Award, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Leadership Fellow, and the Diversity Practitioners Medal of Honor awarded by the Glasgow Group. Currently, Julian contributes to the fields of teacher and history education by serving on the Harvard Graduate School of Education Alumni Council and serving on teacher advisory boards for the Sphere Summit, Facing History and Ourselves, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. His podcasts “Journey In Strength” and “Rear View Ahead” can be found at www.jkbraxton.com
Dr. Sherwin K. Bryant is a scholar of slavery and race in the early modern African Diaspora. His work explores the lives of people of African descent in Latin America, especially in the north Andean regions of what are now Ecuador and Colombia. He is the former director of the Center for African American History at Northwestern, and a co-director of the Andean Cultures and Histories Working Group in the Weinberg Center for Area and International Studies. Bryant’s work has appeared in journals such as The Americas and Colonial Latin American Review. His first monograph, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito, (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) offered the first English-language examination of slavery in Ecuador and southern Colombia. The work advances an understanding of the early modern history of race as a way of showcasing the political importance of slavery in the Americas.
Ms. Tracey Burns currently serves as the Deputy Secretary for Diversity, Equity, Accessibility and Inclusion for the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. She is a native of Queens, New York, with family roots in Washington County, North Carolina, Charleston and Beaufort, South Carolina. Prior to joining the Department, Tracey served as the Historically Underutilized Businesses (HUB) Coordinator in the Facilities Management Department at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). Before joining NCCU, she served as the Director of Cultural History for Historic Sites, Site Manager at Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum, Administrative Services Manager at the North Carolina Transportation Museum and Assistant Manager at Somerset Place. She co-authored one book, entitled Sedalia and The Palmer Memorial Institute (2004).
Dr. William H. Chafe is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor Emeritus of History and is former dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Duke University. He is a co-founder of the Duke-UNC Center for Research on Women, the Duke Center for the Study of Civil Rights and Race Relations, and the Duke Center for Documentary Studies. A past president of the OAH and a recipient of the OAH Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award, he is the author of several books, including Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal (2012); Civilities and Civil Rights (1979), which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award; and Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism (1993), which won the Sidney Hillman Book Award. He is also a co-editor of Remembering Jim Crow (2001) which won the Lillian Smith Book Award.
Dr. Jasmine Nichole Cobb is Professor of African & African American Studies and of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. A scholar of black cultural production and visual representation, Cobb is the author three books including Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (NYUP 2015) and New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair (Duke UP 2022). She is also the editor for African American Literature in Transition, 1800-1830 (Cambridge UP 2021) and has written essays for Public Culture, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and American Literary History. Her work in progress, The Pictorial Life of Harriet Tubman, offers a visual history of the abolitionist, from the middle nineteenth century through the present, including the persistence of the abolitionist’s image in contemporary art and popular culture. Cobb is also a former co-director of the “From Slavery to Freedom” (FS2F) Franklin Humanities Lab at Duke.
Mrs. Rachel Collins received her Bachelors of Science in Education with an emphasis in History at Mississippi Valley State University. She went on to earn a Masters Degree at The University of Mississippi with an emphasis on Curriculum and Instruction. She has dedicated her career to working in urban schools with diverse student populations. She is a 22-year veteran educator at White Station High School in Memphis, TN and member of the Instructional Leadership Team. She has taught African American History for over 10 years and selected to the inaugural pilot for AP African American Studies.
Dr. Elizabeth Clark-Lewis is Professor of History at Howard University. Since 1990 she has directed its Public History Program. The former Director of Graduate Studies has served on the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians and as the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians. She is one of the founders of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Association. Professor Clark-Lewis authored Keep It Locked: 106 Tributes to AJ Calloway (2014); Synergy: Public History At Howard University (2011); Emerging Voices and Paradigms: Black Women’s Scholarship [Co-editor] (2008); First Freed: Emancipation in the District of Columbia (2002); Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, DC (1996); Northern Virginia Community College: An Oral History, 1965 – 1985 [Co-author] (1987); and, The Transition From Live-in to Day Work (1985). Elizabeth Clark-Lewis has written twenty-one articles for scholarly publications. As a co-producer of Freedom Bags, a 1990 WETA/PBS documentary, she received the Oscar Micheaux Best Documentary Award.
Mr. Tom Cryer is a London Arts and Humanities Partnership funded PhD Student and Teaching Assistant at University College London’s Institute of the Americas, where he researches race, memory, and nationhood in the twentieth-century United States through the life, scholarship, and activism of the historian John Hope Franklin. He is an Events Editor for United States Studies Online, a Graduate Representative for the Southern Historical Association, a Seminar Convener for the Institute of Historical Research’s History Labs, and a Podcast Host on the New Books Network.
Dr. William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy,Africa n and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2011-2012) at Stanford, a fellow at the National Humanities Center (1989-90) and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors (1984). He received the Samuel Z. Westerfield Award in 2012 from the National Economic Association, the organization’s highest honor, and has published or edited 12 books and published more than 210 articles in professional journals.
A late eighteenth and nineteenth-century scholar with a specialization in African American women’s history, Erica Armstrong Dunbar is interested in urban slavery, emancipation studies, and the intersection of race and gender in American history. Dunbar is the Charles and Mary Beard Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. Her first book, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City, was published by Yale University Press in 2008. Her second book, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and a winner of the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Award. Dunbar is also the author of She Came to Slay, an illustrated tribute to Harriet Tubman and Susie King Taylor—the first biography in her middle grade series on Black women’s history. From 2018-2022 Dunbar served as the national director of the Association of Black Women Historians. Dunbar also serves as a co-executive producer of the HBO series The Gilded Age.
Mr. John W. Franklin’s focus has been on the history and culture of Africa and its diaspora. His 32-year career at the Smithsonian Institution included developing seminars and symposia, curating folklife programs on the Bahamas, Cape Verde, Washington, D.C. and Mali, and building the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He edited My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin, with his father, John Hope Franklin. Since his retirement from the Smithsonian in 2019, he and Karen Roberts Franklin have established Franklin Global LLC, a consulting and lecturing company.
Ms. Karen Roberts Franklin is a Managing Member of Franklin Global LLC, which is a speaking and consulting firm. Prior to co-founding Franklin Global LLC in 2019, she spent the last three decades as a Realtor in Maryland and Washington, D.C. She is currently researching her families’ history in South Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. Karen is an active member of numerous community and civic organizations including The Association of African American Museums (AAAM), a lifetime member of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the Museums Association of the Caribbean (MAC), and the Silver Spring (MD) Chapter of the Links, Incorporated. She has been a health advocate and navigator for seniors for four decades.
Dr. Nishani Frazier is Professor of History and Director of Public History at North Carolina State University. Prior to North Carolina State University, she was a faculty member at Miami University of Ohio and University of Kansas. Professor Frazier has also held professional public history positions as Associate Curator of African American History and Archives at Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS), Assistant to the Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Archives at the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and personal assistant for Dr. John Hope Franklin, before and during his tenure as chair of President Bill Clinton’s advisory board on “One America”. Her research interests include 1960s freedom movements, oral history, museum studies, archives, and public history, black nationalist philosophy, digital humanities, and black economic development.
Dr. Jarvis R. Givens is Professor of Education and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He specializes in the history of African American education and has authored two books, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, published in 2021 by Harvard University Press, and School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness, published by Beacon Press in 2023. Professor Givens is also the Co-Founding Director of the Black Teacher Archive, a digital collection on African American teachers before 1970, housed at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; and his research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Professor Givens earned his PhD in African American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
Mrs. Shakia Gullette Warren is an experienced museum professional with in-depth knowledge as a public historian and community engagement specialist. She is currently the Executive Director of the Black History and Cultural Center in Richmond, Virginia. Warren obtained her Bachelor of Arts in History from Fisk University in Nashville, TN, and has been a public historian for over ten years. During her tenure in the museum field, she has served as the Inaugural Director of the African American History Initiative at the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, Missouri and Curator of Exhibitions for the Banneker-Douglass Museum in Annapolis, MD. She has received recognition from The American Association for State and Local History (AASLH), the Association of Midwest Museums, the Museum on Main Street, and Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. She has initiated and managed numerous projects throughout the country, significantly contributing to preserving the under-told stories of African Americans.
Dr. Jim C. Harper, II, a native of Mount Olive, North Carolina, has dedicated his career to teaching and inspiring others through lessons of history. After serving in the United States Marine Corps he earned his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in History from North Carolina Central University, and his Ph.D. from Howard University. He currently serves as Interim Associate Dean, School of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of History at North Carolina Central University. He has published one book, Western Educated Elites in . Kenya 1900-1963: The African American Factor. He is currently working on a co-authored manuscript With Faith in God and Heart and Mind: A History of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. which will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2024. Dr. Harper is also a dedicated Public Historian and has completed several Public History research projects including a Digital Mapping Oral History Project in Durham, NC; Durham Memories in the Finding Freedom through Entrepreneurship: Durham’s Black Wall Street; the Diversity Workforce Oral History Project with the National Parks Service. As a scholar, teacher, and public historian, Dr. Harper seeks to expand the use of 21st century technology and historical research methods to engage and inspire students, colleagues, and the public.
Dr. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She chaired Harvard’s Department of African and African Americans Studies from 2006-2013, and chaired the History Department from 2018-2020, the first African American to hold this position. From 2016 through 2021 Higginbotham served as the national president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. A pioneering scholar in African American women’s history, she is noted especially for her two theoretical conceptualizations: “the metalanguage of race” and the “politics of respectability.” She authored the prizewinning book Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church 1880-1920. She is co-author with John Hope Franklin of the ninth edition and most recently tenth edition of From Slavery to Freedom (2021). She has thoroughly revised and rewritten this classic survey first published in 1947. Higginbotham is also co-editor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of the multi-volume African American National Biography. Most notable of her many awards and honors is the 2014 National Humanities Medal, which she received from President Barack Obama at the White House in September 2015 for “illuminating the African American journey.”
Dr. Lisa Beth Hill serves as Director, Inclusion, Equity and Diversity, and as Chair of the Dept. of History at Hamden Hall County Day School in Hamden, CT. Prior to her appointment at Hamden Hall, Lisa Beth served as Program Coordinator for the History Program and Director of Continuing Education at Elizabeth City State University. Before her tenure at ECSU, she served as the Chair of History and Political Science and the Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Tuskegee University. Dr. Hill has over 20 years of teaching and administrative experience primarily at the post-secondary level. Her research fields include Women’s History, Civil War and Civil Rights. Currently, she is working on a manuscript of an African American doctor during the Reconstruction Era from New Haven, CT.
Dr. Maurice Hobson is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Historian at Georgia State University. He earned a Ph.D. degree in History, focusing on African American History and 20th Century U.S. History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are grounded in African American history, 20th Century U.S. history, comparative labor, Africana studies, oral history and ethnography, urban and rural history, political economy, and popular cultural studies. He is the author of the award-winning book titled “The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta.” Dr. Hobson engages the social sciences and has created a new paradigm called the Black New South that explores the experiences of black folk in the American South, with national and international implications, since WWII.
Dr. David H. Jackson Jr., began serving as provost and vice chancellor for Academic Affairs at North Carolina Central University (NCCU) on July 1, 2021. Previously, Dr. Jackson served as associate provost for Graduate Education and dean of the School of Graduate Studies, Research, and Continuing Education at Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University (FAMU) in Tallahassee, Fla., a position he held from 2015 until his appointment at NCCU in 2021. He began his academic career at FAMU in 1997 with his appointment as assistant professor of history. Shortly after, he was promoted to associate professor and full professor in seven years and was later elected chairman of the Department of History, Political Science, Public Administration, Geography and African American Studies at FAMU. Dr. Jackson has published over four dozen scholarly articles, book chapters, short essays, and book reviews, and has presented over 100 scholarly papers and speeches at professional conferences, universities, public schools and other venues throughout the United States. He was recognized as one of FAMU’s most published professors and is author or editor of six scholarly books. Most recently, he co-edited, Emmett J. Scott: Power Broker of the Tuskegee Machine (Texas Tech University Press, 2023).
Dr. Charles D. Johnson is Chair of the Department of History at North Carolina Central. Dr. Johson is a public historian, digital humanist, and activist specializing in Public History in the Global African Diaspora at the community level. His praxis manifests in a passion in oral history, collaborative community-based participatory research, and creating transformative pathways to success. He has co-authored a book, Topics in African Diaspora History (2016), and has partnered on multiple funded research projects with colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the North Carolina African American Heritage Association, Duke University, Durham’s Braggtown Community Association, and DurhamCares. Director of the Public History Program, Co-Author, NCA&T vs. NCCU: More Than Just a Game (Arcadia, 2023), PI, Expanding the Digital Library on American Slavery (ACLS, 2021-2024), Lead History, America’s Voices Against Apartheid (Apartheid Museum and Kennedy Center, 2023) Member, National Board of Directors, National Council of Public History (NCPH) Executive Director, Stagville Descendants Council Advisory Committee (SDCAC)
Dr. Robert Korstad is Emeritus Professor of Public Policy and History at Duke University. He received his B.A. and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include twentieth century U. S. history, labor history, African American history, and contemporary social policy. His most recent publications include: Fragile Democracy: The Struggle Over Race and Voting Rights in North Carolina (coauthor, University of North Carolina Press, 2020); and To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America (co-author, University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith is Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of History at Duke University where she teaches courses on Civil Rights, Black Lives, modern U. S. history, and histories of the Black Freedom Struggle. The author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (2009), Lentz-Smith researches and writes about African Americans’ entanglements with U.S. power in the long twentieth century. She has been at work on a new book, “The Slow Death of Sagon Penn: State Violence and the Twilight of Civil Rights,” traces the devastating aftermath of one young man’s encounter with the police in 1980s San Diego to explore how state violence and white supremacy reconstituted each other in the wake of the civil rights gains of the 1960s. She has published in American Quarterly and in Southern Cultures. Lentz-Smith works to bring scholars into conversation with broad publics. As a senior fellow in Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, she hosts the community conversations series, “The Ethics of Now,” which brings authors, journalists, policy makers, and scholars to Durham to discuss matters of pressing importance to the North Carolina community and beyond.
Dr. Lydia Lindsey is the Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of History at North Carolina Central University; her expertise spans various fields, including British Empire and Commonwealth history, Afro-European history, and Women and Gender Studies. Lindsey earned her B.A. and M.A. in European History from Howard University, including studies at American University. She received her Ph.D. in British Empire and Commonwealth History and Modern European History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During her graduate studies, she had the privilege of studying abroad, where she was in residence at esteemed institutions such as the Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations at the University of Warwick, Coventry, England, and the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London, Senate House, London, England. Lindsey has also made significant contributions to the realm of historical scholarship, with a collection of published articles primarily focusing on twentieth-century British history. Her work delves into the often-overlooked narratives of the black presence in the British Isles and the art of crafting Afro-European history.
Dr. Genna Rae McNeil is Professor Emerita of History at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and a scholar of African American and U.S. Constitutional History. She is widely known for her American Bar Association prize-winning Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights, recognized as the definitive biography of Houston, Thurgood Marshall’s professor and mentor. Professor McNeil has served as Chairperson of the Department of History at Howard University and a visiting professor at Brooklyn College and Howard University’s School of Law. In addition to Groundwork, Professor McNeil is the lead author of Witness: Two Centuries of African American Faith and Practice at the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Harlem, New York, with co-authors Houston B. Robeson, Quinton H. Dixie, and Kevin McGruder (Eerdmans, 2014). Professor McNeil has co-edited three volumes, one of which was with Professor John Hope Franklin, African Americans and the Living Constitution (Smithsonian Press, 1995). She is completing a book-length study of State of North Carolina vs. Joan Little and the “Free Joan Little” Movement. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Kalamazoo College in Michigan and was the first African American woman to graduate with the Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago under the direction of Professor John Hope Franklin.
Mr. Michael Morris, is the newly appointed Director of the Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson, MS. A Jackson native, Morris earned his bachelor’s degree in history and a master’s degree in political science from Jackson State University, where he worked at the Margaret Walker Center and Fannie Lou Hamer Institute on Citizenship and Democracy. Morris began working in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s public relations office in 2016, and served as director of public engagement. He was responsible for co-leading the department’s strategic planning process, coordinating community meetings, leading department research projects, planning major events, and supporting the department director and deputy director during legislative sessions. Morris was a member of the commission that commemorated the city of Jackson’s bicentennial in 2022.
Dr. Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies and Chair of the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University where he offers courses on Black Masculinity, Popular Culture, and Digital Humanities, including signature courses on Michael Jackson & the Black Performance Tradition, and The History of Hip-Hop, which he co-teaches with Grammy Award Winning producer 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit). He is the author of several books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002) and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013). The 10th Anniversary edition of Neal’s New Black Man was published in February of 2015 by Routledge. Neal is co-editor of That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (Routledge), now in its second edition. Additionally, Neal host of the video webcast Left of Black, which is produced in collaboration with the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke. You can follow him on Twitter at @NewBlackMan and IG at @BookerBBBrown.
Dr. Marcus P. Nevius is associate professor of history, jointly appointed in the Department of History and in the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, at the University of Missouri. A scholar of slavery in the Atlantic world, Nevius studies the histories of the political economy of marronage. He lectures and leads undergraduate and graduate seminars in topics in slavery, the Revolution, Confederation, and Early Republican periods in the United States. He is author of City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856 (Georgia, 2020).
Dr. Nell Painter (the artist formerly known as the historian Nell Irvin Painter) is the author of several books and the recipient of degrees in painting from Rutgers University and the Rhode Island School of Design, as well as a Ph.D. in history from Harvard. She lives and works in East Orange, New Jersey, and is currently writing Sojourner Truth Was A New Yorker, and She Didn’t Say That. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2007, she currently serves as Madame Chairman of MacDowell.
Dr. Freddie Parker is currently Professor Emeritus, and former Julius L. Chambers Endowed Professor of History at North Carolina Central University in Durham, N.C. He taught American, African American, and African History at North Carolina Central University for thirty-nine (39) years. He is author of the books, Running for Freedom: Slave Runaways in NC, 1775-1840 and Stealing a Little Freedom: Advertisements for Slave Runaways in NC, 1791-1840. He received the B.A. in History from North Carolina Central University in 1975, the M.A. in History from NCCU in 1977, and the Ph.D. in American History from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1987. In 2013, Dr. Parker received the Christopher Crittenden Award for his career contributions to the historical profession in North Carolina. On February 11, 2020, Dr. Parker was honored by Governor Roy Cooper for his exemplary service and invaluable contributions made to North Carolina’s community and education culture.
Dr. Crystal R. Sanders is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Emory University where she teaches courses on civil rights, Black education, and 20th century United States history. She received her bachelor’s degree in History and Public Policy from Duke University and her Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University. Professor Sanders is the author of the award-winning book, A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle (UNC Press 2016). She is also the author of numerous journal articles that can be found in the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of African American History, and the North Carolina Historical Review. Her work has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. She is currently completing a new book titled “America’s Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs,” which considers African Americans’ pursuit of advanced study during the Age of Jim Crow and southern states’ underfunding and underdevelopment of public Black colleges.
Mr. Andre’ D. Vann, archivist, author, griot, and educator has served as the North Carolina Central University (NCCU) Coordinator of the University Archives in the Dr. James E. Shepard Memorial Library and Instructor of Public History since 2007. Prior to establishing the University Archives at NCCU, Andre served as Assistant Dean of Students in the Division of Students Affairs. Currently, he serves as Coordinator of University Archives and Instructor of Public History in the. He has dedicated over 25 years to the cause of higher education, historical preservation, archival preservation, volunteerism and service to humanity. His research interests are African American History, 20th Century United States History, Southern history, African Americans in Public History and Public Memory and civil rights. He is especially interested in understanding the complex connections between African American history, memory, funerary, race, “Black Wall Street”, and social change in Durham, North Carolina through the twentieth and twenty-first century. Among his publications are African Americans of Durham County (2017).
Dr. 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 with areas of specialization in civil rights and black business 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. Professor 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. Winford is the co-winner of the 2020 Lillian Smith Book Award, presented by the Southern Regional Council, University of Georgia Libraries, Dekalb County Public Library, Georgia SposorsCenter for the Book, and Piedmont College.
Dr. Nick Witham is Associate Professor of United States History and Head of Department of the University College London (UCL) Institute of the Americas. He joined UCL Institute of the Americas in 2015. after serving as Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in American History at Canterbury Christ Church University from 2021 to 2015. Nick’s research on the post-1945 United States is situated at the intersections of political, cultural, and intellectual history. His central preoccupation is how intellectual communities use their knowledge and expertise to intervene in American political and cultural life. This interest has led him in a variety of different directions, encompassing the histories of protest, imperialism and anti-imperialism, historiography, and memory. Nick’s most recent book is Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2023).
Ms. Sonja N. Woods is the University Archivist of Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC) at Howard University. Ms. Woods came to Howard University to pursue her PhD in African History in 2010, redirected her career objectives from the academy to archives, and accepted the position as Archivist at MSRC in March 2016. She earned her BA in English Literature (1995) and her MA in history (2009) at North Carolina Central University. Her primary area of interest as an African History major is southern Africa with particular focus on South Africa.
