Charles McKinney

Charles W. McKinney Jr. is chair of Africana studies and associate professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. His primary research interests include the Civil Rights Movement, and the exploration of local movements in particular. He’s fascinated by the various means individuals and organizations utilized in their efforts to create change. He is the author of Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina, and coeditor of An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee. His next project, tentatively titled The Political Worlds of George Washington Lee: Race, Power, and Politics in Memphis, Tennessee, explores the life and career of George Washington Lee, an African American Republican operative and civil rights activist who lived in Memphis in the middle of the twentieth century. Lee was a staunch supporter of civil rights, and utilized his expansive networks in the African American Civic Universe of Memphis to both build a civil rights movement in the city and combat the rightward drift of the GOP.