The 2025 Distinguished Black History Month Lecture: “The Roots of the Black Working Class”

Blair LM Kelley

Blair LM Kelley, a 2022-23 National Humanities Center Fellow, is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies, co-director of the Southern Futures Initiative, and the Director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kelley's new book project Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (Liveright--W.W. Norton and Company, June 2023), was awarded a 2020 Creative Nonfiction Grant by the Whiting Foundation. She holds both a M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Duke University and earned her B.A. from the University of Virginia in History and African and African American Studies.