Associate Professor of History at Wayne State University
About
Kidada E. Williams is a historian who studies African American survivors of racist violence. She earned her PhD in History at the University of Michigan in 2005.
She is the author of They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War One and co-editor of Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence. Williams's essays have appeared in the Journal of American History, Journal of the Civil War Era, Slate, the New York Times, Bridge Magazine, and DAME.
She is devoted to making sure that the academic history she produces is accessible to non-academic audiences, which is why she has contributed to podcasts for BackStory with the American History Guys and Slate Academy: Reconstruction and has appeared on Morning Edition, On Point, and Detroit Today with Stephen Henderson.
Current Work:
Williams researches African Americans’ accounts of lynching’s and night riding’s impact on their inner lives. She also explores anti-black violence in popular memory.
Williams's current book project tells the story of what African American families in the slaveholding South gained at emancipation and then lost to Ku Klux Klan strikes after the Civil War.
Research Area Keyword(s):
African American, racial violence, southern history
