Blair Kelley She/Her
Speaker, Author, Historian
Fields of expertise:
Blair LM Kelley, Ph.D. is an award-winning author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience. A dedicated public historian, Kelley works to amplify the histories of Black people, chronicling the everyday impact of their activism. She is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the co-director of Southern Futures, and the director of the Center for the Study of the American South, the first Black woman to serve in that role in the center’s thirty-year history.
Kelley's work extends beyond academia through her public scholarship, including contributions to various media outlets and public speaking engagements that bring historical perspectives to contemporary social issues.
Kelley is the author of two books. The first, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship (UNC Press), traces a generation of activists who protested the passage of segregation laws on trains and streetcars. Right to Ride was awarded the 2010 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. Kelley’s newest book, Black Folk: The Roots the Black Working Class (Liveright), uses portraits of her ancestors to chronicle the lives and labors of the Black working class from slavery to the present. Black Folk which was selected as one of Smithsonian’s and Amazon’s Best Books of 2023, was awarded the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, the 2024 Philip Taft Labor History Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History. She is currently completing Jubilee: The Untold Stories of the Celebrations of Juneteenth and Emancipation Day (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers/Hachette Books), which will feature photos and her essays on Juneteenth and the history of Emancipation Day celebrations.
