About

William Sturkey is an historian of the United States, specializing in the history of race in the American South since 1865. His research focuses on the experiences of working-class racial minorities living in the United States. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in modern American history, African American history, southern history, and historical research methods and writing. Sturkey is the author of numerous books, including 'To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools,' a co-edited collection of newspapers, essays, and poems produced by African American Freedom School students during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, and 'Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White,' a biracial history that traces the rise-and-fall of Jim Crow through the racial and economic history of a Southern city between 1880 and 1966. He is currently working on 'Precious Lord, Take My Hand,' a narrative history of the Americas in the 1960s. Beyond scholarship and teaching, Sturkey is a deeply engaged public scholar, with writings in various popular venues, and he is a regular public speaker and moderator for events such as author interviews, public panels, museum exhibitions, and podcasts.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Business
• Philosophy
• Law
• Art
• Art history
• Theology
• Chemistry
• History
• Finance

Selected publications

• Race and Reconciliation on the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad

  UNC Libraries · 2025-08-22

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  An old railroad track runs through the Mississippi Piney Woods to the Gulf of Mexico, timeworn and unnoticed, but riddled with meaning. Fastened to Earth with rusted rails and cracked wooden ties, the track traverses roughly 150 miles of forest on its way to the sea. Every day, people in cars and trucks ramble across the rails without a second thought. To most, the unused tracks are merely bumps under the rubber, slight jolts to busy days filled with work, errands, and social events. Overgrown and forgotten, the old road is no longer needed, but its legacy lingers.

  PublisherDOI

• "Blocks for Freedom": Sewing for Voting in Post-Jim Crow Mississippi

  Southern cultures · 2024-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: This article examines a voting rights campaign known as "Blocks for Freedom" that was launched in 1966 to help a group of rural African American women in Clay County, Mississippi, protect their right to vote. These Black women faced significant obstacles to vote even after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Local white vigilantes and county administrators used violence and the threat of informal economic sanctions to punish Black citizens who registered to vote. "Blocks for Freedom" sought to circumvent these limitations by creating jobs for Black women that would offer a living wage and protect their ability to cast ballots. Led by poor women in Mississippi and civil rights advocates in New York City, this innovative campaign shows how grassroots activists encountered voter suppression techniques employed to dilute the Black vote after the Civil Rights Movement.

  PublisherDOI

• January 6 and the Politics of History

  University of Georgia Press eBooks · 2024-01-01

  book
  PublisherDOI

• Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Poor People's Campaign of 1968

  Journal of American History · 2023 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Art

  Journal Article Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Poor People's Campaign of 1968 Get access Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Poor People's Campaign of 1968. By Robert Hamilton. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020. xiv, 308 pp. Cloth, $114.95. Paper, $39.95.) William Sturkey William Sturkey University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 110, Issue 2, September 2023, Pages 384–385, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaad223 Published: 01 September 2023

  PublisherDOI

• The Freedom News:

  Northwestern University Press eBooks · 2022-04-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (2019)

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Chemistry
  PublisherDOI

• Just Trying to Have School: The Struggle for Desegregation in Mississippi by Natalie G. Adams, James H. Adams

  The Journal of Southern History · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Just Trying to Have School: The Struggle for Desegregation in Mississippi by Natalie G. Adams, James H. Adams William Sturkey Just Trying to Have School: The Struggle for Desegregation in Mississippi. By Natalie G. Adams and James H. Adams. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018. Pp. xiv, 299. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1954-3; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1953-6.) Just Trying to Have School: The Struggle for Desegregation in Mississippi is an intriguing new book about the history of racial desegregation in Mississippi public schools during the late 1960s and early 1970s. School desegregation in Mississippi was (and continues to be) a prolonged struggle that provoked extraordinary resistance. As the authors note, “No state fought more fiercely to preserve segregated public schools than Mississippi” (p. 5). Natalie G. Adams and James H. Adams, both academics and former teachers, attended southern public schools during the era of desegregation. Their intellectual backgrounds provide insights that allow them to deliver a fascinating overview of the painstaking process of school desegregation in the Magnolia State. As most readers know, school desegregation in Mississippi did not begin with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. In fact, no black and white students attended public schools together in Mississippi until 1964. As the authors note, it was not actually until after Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education in 1969 that most Mississippi school districts were forced to generate bona fide plans for immediate desegregation. The strength of Just Trying to Have School lies in the sections that describe the process of desegregation in the wake of Alexander v. Holmes County. Attorneys and politicians were the most visible combatants in the battle over school desegregation, but the actual process of school desegregation was facilitated by mostly uncelebrated groups of students, parents, superintendents, teachers, and coaches. These actors, as Adams and Adams appropriately note, were “[p]ioneers yet quite ordinary individuals” (p. 35). Drawing our attention to these important, yet understudied, individuals is a welcome approach in a field dominated by the literature of massive resistance and the civil rights activism of the 1950s and 1960s. After two chapters describing the path toward Alexander, Adams and Adams offer several thematic chapters that examine public school desegregation through a variety of lenses. The first lens focuses on the roles of school employees—teachers, principals, and superintendents—in desegregation. The next set of themes explores school desegregation through extracurricular activities such as [End Page 228] athletics and high school proms. The final section details resistance to school desegregation, especially “the establishment of private segregationist academies throughout the state,” which Adams and Adams claim is “the ultimate form of white resistance to school desegregation” (p. 9). Although not explicitly stated, the other argument in this book is that political leaders in Mississippi, and presumably in many southern locales, left school officials vastly underprepared to deal with the realities of federally mandated school desegregation. Segregationists’ constant howling and cataclysmic predictions over school desegregation certainly did not help. Most impressive in this book are the dozens of oral histories with former education leaders who were involved in these fraught processes of desegregating public schools. Each chapter draws on these interviews to deliver rich anecdotes about the struggles of school desegregation. Here, readers meet sympathetic educators, characterized as “[n]either heroes nor villains,” who navigated those immense challenges (p. 121). The individual stories are interesting, but it would have also been useful for the authors to frame these anecdotes in a way that allows readers to grasp their applicability for the rest of the state or the region. Certainly, differences existed by locale. In any case, Just Trying to Have School is a compelling portrait of the people who had no choice but to try to make school desegregation work. This study will be valuable to historians of education in the American South, especially those interested in the educational conflicts that emerged after the more widely celebrated civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s. William Sturkey University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

  PublisherDOI

• Session Laws Passed by the North Carolina General Assembly During 1866/67-1967, Identified by Machine Learning as Laws Likely to be Jim Crow Laws (plain text format, single file) version 2

  2020-01-01

  articleOpen access

  This corpus was created for a text analysis project called On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance. On the Books focused specifically on the laws passed during the Jim Crow Era, which is defined for this project as the period between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement (1866-1967). In addition to creating the corpus, the project also used machine learning to identify discoverable North Carolina segregation statutes during the Jim Crow era. This corpus contains all of the laws identified as those likely to be Jim Crow laws in a single file in plain text format. This is version 2 of the data. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution non-commercial 3.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• THE MISSISSIPPI POOR PEOPLE’S CORPORATION

  University Press of Mississippi eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Business
  • Finance
  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER EIGHT. Community Children

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2019-04-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Lauren B. Bruckner

  3 shared

• Rucha Dalwadi

  3 shared

• Matt Jansen

  3 shared

• Kimber Thomas

  3 shared

• Neil Byers

  Joint Genome Institute

  3 shared

• Amanda Henley

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  3 shared

• Jon Hale

  1 shared

• Elizabeth Hinton

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Associate Professor of Ameri…