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Kidada E. Williams (2016)

Kidada E. Williams is associate professor of history at Wayne State University where she teaches African American history. Williams was born and raised in West Michigan and attended Central for her undergraduate and Master’s degrees. She earned her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2005.

 

Williams specializes in African Americans’ experiences of racial violence, specifically white terror strikes after the Civil War and lynching and rape in the late 19th and early 20th century. She is the author of They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War One, published by New York University Press in 2012, and essays “The Aftermaths of Lynching” and “The Wounds that Cried Out: Reckoning with African Americans’ Testimonies of Trauma and Suffering from Night Riding.” Williams is finishing a book on African Americans’ accounts of traumatic injury and displacement from Ku Klux Klan attacks. After that, she hopes to start researching rape culture in Detroit from the 1970s to 1990s. Williams sees herself as what Jason Steinhauer calls a “history communicator,” which is to say she is committed to making African American and American history accessible to non-academic audiences.


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