December 14, 2018

Thought Leader: African Americans' lived experiences of racist violence

Kidada Williams

Kidada E. Williams, associate professor of history, is a nationally recognized expert on African Americans' lived experiences of racist violence. She teaches courses on African American and American history and offers lectures and talks at public institutions including the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit Historical Museum, the Henry Ford Museum and the American Civil War Museum, and she shares historical information on social media. Williams contributes to NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes that help K-12 educators broaden their understandings of U.S. history and culture. She has appeared on NPR's "Morning Edition" and "On Point," and WDET's "Detroit Today" with Stephen Henderson. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, DAME, Slate and Bridge Magazine.

She is expert in the areas of:

African American history
Racist violence
History of violence
U.S. history

Williams is also one of the co-developers of #CharlestonSyllabus, a crowd-sourced project that helped people understand the historical context surrounding the 2015 racial massacre at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Recently, she has been extending her commitment to public humanities by sharing her expertise on survivors of anti-black violence on podcasts, documentaries and television series. Williams was a guest contributor to the Slate Academy history series on Reconstruction, and her research was featured twice on BackStory with the American History Guys. She is also lending her insight to forthcoming documentaries on Reconstruction and southern lynchings.