2024 Southeast Benefit

Carol Anderson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of five books, including Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, which was awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards, and Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960. Her third book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide, won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and her fourth book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy, was long-listed for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Book Award in Non-Fiction. Her fifth book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, was a New York Times Editor’s pick, a Library Journal’s Best Social Science Books of 2021, and a Writer’s Bone’s Best Books of 2021. 

Professor Anderson has been named a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected to the American Philosophical Society and the Society of American Historians. In addition to numerous teaching awards, her research has garnered fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, National Humanities Center, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center, the University of Connecticut’s Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, the University of Chicago’s Pozen Center for Human Rights, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She’s been selected as a Presidential Scholar at Amherst College and honored with the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize from Brandeis University, the James W. C. Pennington Award from Heidelberg University in Germany, and the Ella Baker Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Anderson was a member of the US State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee, the Pulitzer Prize Committee for History, and the National Book Awards Committee in Non-Fiction. She earned her PhD in history from The Ohio State University.