Blair LM Kelley

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. Kelley is currently the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the incoming 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 is the author of two books that trace the protests that toppled segregation and the people and movements that challenged the inequities of race and class. The first, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship (UNC Press), chronicles the little-known Black men and women who protested the passage of laws segregating trains and streetcars at the turn of the twentieth century. Right to Ride highlights the women and men who led and participated in protests, recounting those thousands of Black southerners who fought valiantly for equal treatment despite the tremendous threat of racial violence. The first book-length treatment of the streetcar boycott movement, Right to Ride was awarded the 2010 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians, and has become canonical for scholars studying the history of segregation, civil rights, and Black women’s history, reviving scholarly interest in the streetcar boycott movement and turn of the century African American activism.

Kelley’s newest book, Black Folk: The Roots the Black Working Class (Liveright), begins with the question “What does it mean to be Black and working class?” Drawing on family histories and continuing into the archive, Black Folk illuminates the adversities and joys of the Black working class in America in the past and present. Connecting the everyday, lived experience of working black people to wider discussions of the American working class, Black Folk argues that the history of the Black working class provide a crucial model of how we should engage a wider swath of Americans citizens in informed citizenship. Black Folk was awarded a 2020 Creative Nonfiction Grant by the Whiting Foundation, and the 2022-23 John Hope Franklin/NEH Fellowship by National Humanities Center.

Active inside the academy and out, Kelley has produced and hosted her own podcast and has been a guest on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon; MSNBC’s All In and Melissa Harris Perry Show, and Velshi; NPR’s Here and Now, WNYC’s The Takeaway, Democracy Now and WUNC’s The State of Things. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Root, The Grio, Ebony, Salon, and Jet Magazine. Highlighted as one of the top-tweeting historians by History News Network, she has been tweeting as @profblmkelley for more than thirteen years and has over 46,000 followers.

Kelley received her B.A. from the University of Virginia in History and African and African American Studies. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in History, and graduate certificates in African and African American Studies and Women’s Studies at Duke University.