CAROL ANDERSON
Bestselling author of the books White Rage, One Person, No Vote and The Second
Carol is a preeminent historian of African American history and an Influential voice of civil and voting rights, Carol helps audiences understand oppression through a historical context, and gives audiences ways to better society moving forward.
Carol Anderson
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Carol Anderson is professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of several bestselling books including The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (2020), One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018) and the critically-acclaimed #1 bestseller White Rage (2016).
In 2019, Carol contributed an essay to the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project, an award-winning reframing of American history that placed slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative (now available as a book).
Professor Anderson is also the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Cambridge University Press), which was awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards. Her book Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation,1941-1960 was published by Cambridge in 2014.
Her research has garnered substantial fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, National Humanities Center, Harvard University, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
She has also served on working groups dealing with race at Stanford’s Center for Applied Science and Behavioral Studies, the Aspen Institute, and the United Nations. In addition, based on the strength and accessibility of her research, the leadership at Amnesty International, USA, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Ford Foundation, and others have used Eyes Off the Prize to frame and examine their human rights work in the United States.
This has also led to sought after commentary in Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, and CNN.com that places contemporary issues dealing with race, human rights, and politics in a historical perspective. Her Washington Post op-ed, “White Rage,” was the most widely shared for the paper in 2014.
Exclusively represented by BrightSight Speakers bureau, Professor Anderson was a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee and the Board of Directors of the Harry S. Truman Library Institute and the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative.
Speech topics
One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Based on her bestselling book, Professor Carol Anderson chronicles the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the Shelby ruling, this decision effectively allowed districts with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice. Focusing on the aftermath of Shelby, Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. In gripping, enlightening detail she explains how voter suppression works, from photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans.
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
Since the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, White reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow. Then there was the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House. Carol carefully links these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition. She pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, and renders visible the long lineage of White rage, adding an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America.
The Second: race and guns in fatally unequal america
Historian Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. In this talk based on her acclaimed book, The Second, Carol will share — through compelling historical narrative, merging into the unfolding events of today— how the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America.
When the Levees Broke: A History of Un-Civil Rights in America
In this presentation, Professor Anderson explains the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans through the lens of U.S. foreign policy decisions in the 1940s and ‘50s. Based, in part, on her book, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955.
The Danger of the Single Story: African Americans’ Anticolonialism in the Early Cold War
An academic (but engaging) presentation on the NAACP’s crusade against apartheid South Africa, 1948–1951.
Books
One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
With One Person, No Vote, Carol Anderson chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Watch:
Carol Anderson was recently featured on two documentary efforts aiming to curb voter suppression. On Netflix: Whose Votes Counts, a series narrated and produced by Leonardo DiCaprio. And the feautre-length documentary All In: The Fight for Democracy, availale on Amazon Prime.
carol's #1 bestseller 'white rage'
We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide
This young adult adaptation of the New York Times bestselling White Rage is essential antiracist reading for teens.
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
Bestselling & award-winning work which reframes our continuing conversation about race, chronicling the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America.
The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America
This is an unflinching, critical new look at the Second Amendment--and how it has been engineered to deny the rights of African Americans since its inception
Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955
The "prize" they sought was not civil rights, but human rights.
Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960
Exploring the NAACP's key role in the liberation of Africans and Asians across the globe.
Documentary
The latest Humanity in Action film project is a feature-length documentary film from the mind of Carol Anderson. Co-produced by the Bertelsmann Foundation with generous support from the Donner Foundation, I, Too premiered on September 8, 2022 in Atlanta, GA, with further screenings in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and Athens, Greece, and other cities.
Learn more here.