About the Author

I grew up browsing the exhibits at the George Washington Carver Museum and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and wished for similar insight into my own family history. My historical research began around age ten when I "shopped" through microfilmed pages of the 1910s Sears catalog. Fascination with the racial justice themes portrayed in reruns of the "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" inspired me to focus on African American history. My U.T. Austin honors undergraduate thesis on American Christians' patterns of interracialism and segregation made me wonder about the impact of global contexts on race relations within the United States. At U.N.C. Chapel Hill, I completed a dissertation on the work of three women from the American South who became missionaries in the mid to late nineteenth century. The chapter on a Southern Presbyterian missionary blossomed into later publications on the history of African American Presbyterian ministers since 1894.

I continue to study the strategies that African American Protestant leaders used to promote their goals for social justice and higher education during most of the Jim Crow era (the 1890s through the 1950s). Witnessing the continuance of these leaders' goals through the work of their surviving relatives, their African communities, and their favorite historically black colleges and universities has been a privilege. Most recently, I have started articles connecting African American missionaries and leaders within the Y.W.C.A. and Y.MC.A. to the black freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s.