Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Affiliation: North Carolina State University--History/Interdisciplinary Studies

Keywords: African American History, black women's history, black working class, the Civil Rights Movement, the history of segregation, the history of blackface minstrelsy, Black twitter

About Me: Blair LM Kelley is a historian of the African American experience. She currently serves as the Assistant Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies and International Programs for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University. Her book Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (UNC Press, 2010) won the 2010 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. She is currently at work on a new book project, Black Folk: The Promise of the Black Working Class which is under contract with Liveright-WW Norton & Co.

Recent Publications

“What Civil Rights History Can Teach Kavanaugh’s Critics,”

Oct 13, 2018, New York Times

“What Civil Rights History Can Teach Kavanaugh’s Critics,”
“If enslaved African Americans weren’t mentally strong there wouldn’t even be a Kanye West,”
May 3, 2018, The Washington Post

“If enslaved African Americans weren’t mentally strong there wouldn’t even be a Kanye West,”
You can’t tell U.S. history without black history. Finally, a museum gets that.

Aug 9, 2016, Washington Post

A review of the National Museum of African American History and Culture

You can’t tell U.S. history without black history. Finally, a museum gets that.
Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson
May 3, 2010, UNC Press

Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson

Expertise by Topic: Emancipation, Gender, Law, Migration & Immigration, Public History, Race, Urban History, Women