Dr. Yohuru Williams
DISTINGUISHED UNIVERSITY CHAIR and PROFESSOR AND FOUNDING DIRECTOR OF THE RACIAL JUSTICE INITIATIVE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS
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 Al Jazeera 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. He is also 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.
