Department Faculty

“I am a U. S. Social Historian with an interest in the social and political history of the U.S. South with special reference to African American history. My most recent book, American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (Harvard University Press, 2003), focused on the African American freedom struggle in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta during the first half of the twentieth century. It received the 2004 McClemore Prize and Honorable Mention for the 2004 Benjamin Hooks Institute for Social Change Book Prize. My articles have appeared in the Journal of Southern History, Radical History Review, and in Charles Payne and Adam Green, Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950, among others. My current research focuses on Memory and Violence among African Americans in the South, 1920-present. I am the National Coordinator for the UNESCO Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project-USA that works with public school teachers around the issues of the slave trade and its legacy with an aim toward achieving understanding and reconciliation. I currently serve on the Executive Committee of the Southern Historical Association and the 2009 Program Committee for the Organization of American Historians.”