Blair L.M. Kelley

Dr. Blair LM Kelley is Associate Professor of History and Assistant Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies and International Programs in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson, published in the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture at the University Press of North Carolina in 2010 and was awarded the 2010 Letitia Woods Brown Best Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. She is currently at work on a new book manuscript, The Execution of Corrine Sykes: Black Maids, Murder, and Memory which explores the racial climate in World War II era Philadelphia during the trial and execution of Corrine Sykes, a black woman convicted of murder who became the last woman put to death by Pennsylvania in its history. Her latest book Black Folk: The Promise of the Black Working Class is forthcoming from Norton.

A proponent of engaging publics in both traditional and new media, Kelley has been a guest on Here & Now, Melissa Harris Perry Show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Democracy Now, and WUNC’s The State of Things. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, TheRoot.com, TheGrio.com, Ebony.com, Salon.com, Jet Magazine, and Medium.com. Kelley produced and hosted a podcast called Historical Blackness. She also has more than 38,000 engaged followers on Twitter.