Kidada Elease Williams (bb2756)

History

3069 Faculty/Administration Building (FAB)

Kidada E. Williams (here's a bio for introductions) is a historian and professor who researches African Americans' experiences of racist violence. At Wayne State, she teaches African American history, U.S. history, and historical research methods.

The earliest proponents of African American history intended their research to reach the broadest possible audience. Williams tries to bridge the gap between academic history and public knowledge through teaching, lectures, media appearances, and contributions to platforms like podcasts and documentary films, aiming to educate a broader audience about the historical and ongoing impacts of racist violence.

Williams began this work as a graduate student researching the Underground Railroad in Washtenaw County, Michigan, and co-creating a bus tour. She has given talks at a variety of public institutions. She has contributed to NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes and was on the Zinn Education Project's roster of People's Historians, both of which helped K-12 teachers broaden their understandings of U.S. history and develop new strategies for teaching challenging subject matter. She appeared on Skip Gates's PBS award-winning series Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, Nikole Hannah-Jones's "The 1619 Project" series on Hulu and rebroadcast on ABC, NPR's "Morning Edition" and "On Point," WDET's "Detroit Today," and "BackStory with the American History Guys." Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, DAME, Slate, and Bridge Magazine. Williams' work contributed to her 2024 election to the Society of American Historians.

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 AME Church.

Lately, she has been extending her commitment to African American history by sharing her expertise on survivors of anti-Black violence on podcasts, like Scene on Radio's The Land That Has Never Been Yet, Why Is This Happening? with Chris Hayes, MSNBC's Into America with Trymaine Lee, and the Slate Academy history series on Reconstruction. She was the host and co-producer of Seizing Freedom, a podcast docudrama created by Kelly Hardcastle Jones, that covered the epic story of African Americans' fight for freedom during the Civil War and beyond.

Contact

Email is the best way to reach her: kidada.williams@wayne.edu (if you need to arrange book signings, please contact Bloomsbury or email me for direct contact). Williams' existing and emerging commitments don't enable her to fulfill last minute requests or work on demand so please try to plan ahead, include all relevant details, and remember that Black History Month and Juneteenth are the same time every year. 😉 

Need a concise bio to introduce her?

There's no need to struggle about what to say when there's a press kit.

Want the expertise of other historians?

The historical profession, has plenty of experts, including ones on African American history or U.S. history, who can meet your needs. Check out:

• Association for the Study of African American Life and History's Carter G. Woodson Distinguished Lecturers.
• Organization of American Historians' Distinguished Lecturers, experts in African American history are American historians, too, so we're members of the OAH and we're on the OAH's roster of Distinguished Lecturers.
• Women Also Know History database, which is searchable by topic and includes contact information.

History resources for K-12 teachers, parents and general folks

K-12 teachers and parents often ask Williams for accessible resources on the history she teaches. Here is a page with a not exhaustive list of links for teaching and learning African American and U.S. history. The page includes links to lesson plans, primary sources, shows, classes, and workshops.

African American history

U.S. history

Survivors of violence

Williams investigates African Americans' tesimonies about their traumatic injuries from racist violence after slavery. She is the author of I Saw Death Coming (longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction and 2024 winner of the Organization of American Historians' Civil War and Reconstruction Book Prize) and They Left Great Marks on Me. She has published "Legacies of Violence" (in the National Museum of African American History and Culture's Make Good the Promises), "Writing Victims' Personhoods and People into the History of Lynching," "Never Get Over It,"  "Maintaining a Radical Vision of African Americans in the Age of Freedom," "The Wounds that Cried Out," and "Regarding the Aftermaths of Lynching." Her research has been supported twice by fellowships from the Ford Foundation.

Graduate research supervision

Williams would be interested in supervising graduate students who wish to work on any topic relating to her expertise. She is particularly interested in working with students whose theoretical and methodological approaches align with Black Studies approaches to History and with Critical Trauma Studies examinations of violence. She also welcomes proposals regarding any aspect of African Americans' life, history, and culture.
She is best suited to supervise students who already have a clear historical research agenda--including a well-defined research question, an identified archive, and some knowledge of the historiography for the specific subject. Students who are looking to develop a research agenda would benefit from familiarizing themselves with the best research practices outlined in Jules Benjamin's A Student's Guide to History and Wayne C. Booth et al, eds., The Craft of Research. Here is a great primer on writing research statements.

• Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2005
• M.A., Central Michigan University, 1998
• B.S., Central Michigan University, 1996

• Career Development Chair, Wayne State University, 2014
• Board of Governors Faculty Recognition Award, Wayne State University, 2013
• President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Wayne State University, 2011
• College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Award for Teaching, Wayne State University, 2011
• Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship Competition, Wayne State University, 2011
• Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2008
• Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, “Topographies of Violence” Residency Research Grant, The University of Michigan, Fall 2008
• Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for Minorities, 2002
• Board of Governors Faculty Recognition Award, Wayne State University, 2024
• Organization of American Historians' Civil War and Reconstruction Book Prize, 2024

• Author discussion on American slavery today
• Book by WSU professor, historian Kidada E. Williams nominated for 2023 National Book Award
• The ten contenders for the National Book Award for Nonfiction
• Historian focuses on lives of Black Americans during reconstruction
• WSU history professor Kidada Williams discusses "I Saw Death Coming," her powerful new book about Black survival during the Reconstruction era

Books

• I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction. Bloomsbury, 2023
• They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I. New York University Press, 2012

Edited books

• With Chad Williams and Keisha N. Blain, Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence. University of Georgia Press, 2016
• A portion of the royalties will go to the Lowcountry Ministries Fund to address issues of social justice and economic empowerment in underserved communities in the South Carolina Lowcountry

Articles and chapters

• “Legacies of Violence,” in Kinshasha Holman Conwill and Paul Gardullo, eds., Make Good the Promises: Reclaiming Reconstruction and Its Legacies, 2021
• "Writing Lynching Victims' Personhoods and People into the History of Lynching," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 19:4 (2020)
• "Never Get Over It: Night Riding's Imprint on Its African American Victims," in Reconstruction and the Arc of Racial (in)Justice Edward Elgar, 2018
• "Maintaining a Radical Vision of African Americans in the Age of Freedom," Journal of the Civil War Era 7:1 (2017)
• "The Wounds that Cried Out: Reckoning with African Americans' Testimonies of Trauma and Suffering from Nightriding" in Gregory Downs and Kate Masur, eds. The World the Civil War Made. University of North Carolina Press, 2015
• "Regarding the Aftermaths of Lynching," Journal of American History 101:4 (2014)

Select public scholarship and appearances

• Zinn Education Project, Teaching the Black Freedom Struggle Online
• AskHistorians, Histories of Violence
• Respectfully Yours, Gainer Atkins, BackStory Radio
• The Psychic Toll of Night Rides, Slate
• With Danielle L. McGuire, Raped and left on the road, she said #MeToo. Jurors said, 'No, not You.' and Say Her Name. Shawana Hall. She is a Hero, Bridge Magazine
• The Difference 10 Miles Makes, BackStory Radio 
• Centuries of Violence (on the massacre at Charleston's AME Church), Slate
• Account for the Pillaging of African-American Freedom, New York Times
• Trayvon Martin killing: The legacy of extralegal racial violence continues on, NYU Press

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