2024 Niemeyer Speaker
More Than Cookies and Crayons: Head Start and the Mississippi Black Freedom Struggle
Featuring Crystal R. Sanders, PhD
Thursday, May 16 at 5:30 PM
Tabas Auditorium, Bank Street College
Crystal R. Sanders, an award-winning historian of the United States in the 20th century, is an associate professor of African American studies at Emory University. Previously, she was an associate professor of history and the director of the Africana Research Center at Pennsylvania State University.
Sanders is the author of A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016 as part of the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. The book won the 2017 Critics Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association and the 2017 New Scholar’s Book Award from Division F of the American Educational Research Association. The book was also a finalist for the 2016 Hooks National Book Award. Sanders’s work can also be found in many of the leading history journals including the Journal of Southern History, the North Carolina Historical Review, and the Journal of African American History.
Sanders is the recipient of a host of fellowships and prizes. These honors include the C. Vann Woodward Prize from the Southern Historical Association, the Huggins-Quarles Award from the Organization of American Historians, and the Equity Award from the American Historical Association. She has also received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Visiting Scholars Fellowship at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a National Humanities Center Fellowship.
Sanders’s next book, America’s Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owned to Public HBCUs, will be published by UNC Press in Fall 2024.