Professor Rhonda Y. Williams is a historian of low-income black women’s and marginalized people’s experiences, everyday lives, politics and social struggles. She is a Professor of History and a John L. Seigenthaler Chair in American History at Vanderbilt University. Her research contributes to the rethinking of gender, political identity, citizenship, civil rights, black liberation struggles, and interactions with the U.S. state. She is the author of the award-winning The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (2004) and Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (2015).

She will be speaking at the MECC campus on March 7th, from 9 – 10:30 AM on the Struggles for Freedom in the 20th Century.