Project Leaders

Core Team:

Caree Banton (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the African and African American Studies program at the University of Arkansas. Her book More Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African Republic was supported by numerous awards, including the Lapidus Center Fellowship at the Schomburg Center and the Nancy Weiss Malkiel Fellowship. The University of Arkansas’s College of Arts and Sciences gave her its highest teaching honor, Master Teacher, in 2018, and she is a member of the University’s Teaching Academy, ranking her among the faculty’s finest teachers.

Michael Pierce (PhD, Ohio State University) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, the lead scholar of the University of Arkansas Humanities Center’s Nelson Hackett Project, associate editor of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, and winner of multiple teaching and mentoring awards. He is the author or editor of three books and more than a dozen scholarly essays.

Charlene Johnson (PhD, Emory University) Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction will serve as the K-12 supervisor for the institute. Johnson is the President of the Arkansas Chapter of the National Association for Multicultural Education and has successfully worked with K-12 educators on numerous curricular and cadre-building projects creating communities of educators who help each other as well as build inclusive educational environments.

Synetra Morris is the Vice Principal of Owl Creek School in the Fayetteville School District of Arkansas and has twenty-one years’ experience working in public schools in multiple subject areas. She has curriculum and classroom experience that will help participants connect the materials of the workshop to their educational situations. 

Rebekah Chaney Griggs (Workshop Coordinator)  is currently pursuing her Master of Arts in History at the University of Arkansas. Rebekah is working to research the role of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas during the Freedom Summer voter registration drive of 1965, specifically focusing on the objectives and accomplishments of Freedom Schools. 

Consulting Experts:

Richard Blackett is the Andrew Jackson Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and a specialist on the abolitionist movement in the United States and its transatlantic connections. The author of five monographs, nearly two dozen articles and book chapters, and a former associate editor of the Journal of American History, Blackett was named the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University for 2013-2014.

Déanda M. Johnson, former Coordinator of African American Research and Service Institute at the Ohio State University, has supervised multiple workshops and outreach events to inform educators and the public of the National Park Services’ Network to Freedom Program.

Mary Niall Mitchell holds the Ethel & Herman L. Midlo Endowed Chair in New Orleans Studies. She is the Raphael Cassimere Professor of African American History and Director of the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies.  Dr. Mitchell is one of five lead historians for Freedomonthemove.org, a collaborative database of fugitive slave advertisements based at Cornell University.