North Carolina Society of Historians Book AwardSouthern Conference on African American Studies, Inc., C. Calvin Smith-Wali R Kharif Book AwardFinalist, Hooks National Book AwardThe life and accomplishments of an influential leader in the desegregated SouthThis biography of educational activist and Black studies forerunner Bertha Maxwell-Roddey examines a life of remarkable achievements and l...

Jonathan Daniel Wells and Jennifer R. Green provide a series of provocative essays reflecting innovative, original research on professional and commercial interests in the nineteenth-century South, a place often seen as being composed of just two classes—planters and slaves. Rather, an active middle class, made up of men and women devoted to the cultural and economic modernization of Dixie, worked with each other—and occasionally their northern counterparts—to bring reforms to the region.

This biography of educational activist and Black studies forerunner Bertha Maxwell-Roddey examines a life of remarkable achievements and leadership in the desegregated South. Sonya Ramsey modernizes the nineteenth-century term "race woman" to describe how Maxwell-Roddey and her peers turned hard-won civil rights and feminist milestones into tangible accomplishments in North Carolina and nationwide from the late 1960s to the 1990s.Born in 1930, Maxwell-Roddey became one of Charlotte...