Thursday, February 20 2025, 4 - 5pm 221 LeConte Hall Join us for a guest lecture with Dr. Kenja McCray. Kenja McCray is a humanities faculty member at Clayton State University, where she teaches history. Dr. McCray has also served as a Visiting Associate Professor of History at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She holds a Ph.D. in history from Georgia State University and a B.A. from Spelman College. Her research focuses on the 20th century United States, African Americans, Africa and the diaspora, transnational histories, women, and leadership. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians, the Sixties Journal, Indiana Magazine of History, and Histoire Sociale/Social History. Dr. McCray’s monograph, Essential Soldiers, is forthcoming in August 2025. The book focuses on the unique organizing and advocacy style of female Pan-African nationalists during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Academics and popular observers have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—that it was male dominated and overrun with authoritarian leaders. Yet women’s strategizing, management, and sustained work were integral to movement organizations’ functioning, and female advocates of Pan-African cultural nationalism often exhibited unique leadership styles. Based on the research for her upcoming book, Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership, Kenja McCray will discuss how women Pan-African nationalists produced a distinctive kind of leadership through their devotion and service to the struggle for freedom and equality. Relying on oral histories, textual archival material, and scholarly literature, this talk highlights the women’s organizing, resistance efforts, and the challenges they posed to one-dimensional notions of gender roles within cultural nationalist organizations. Revealing a service-oriented, collaborative style of leadership that has never been identified before, Dr. McCray will provide a new vantage point for considering Black Power leadership legacies. Free and open to the public. Refreshments. This is a Black History Month special presentation. Dr. Kenja McCray History Clayton State University Kenja McCray
