About our authors
Clayborne Carson was born in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, and since 1974 has taught at Stanford University where he is now Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor of History. He has also been a visiting professor or fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Morehouse College, Emory University, American University, Harvard University, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Active during his undergraduate years in the civil rights and antiwar movements, Carson has published many works on the African American freedom struggles of the post-World War II period. His first book, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981), won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. He has also published Malcolm X: The FBI File (1991) and Martin’s Dream: My Journey and the Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2013). He served as senior advisor for the award-winning PBS series on the civil rights movement entitled Eyes on the Prize, as well as contributed to many other documentaries, such as Freedom on My Mind (1994), Blacks and Jews (1997), Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (2002), Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power (2005), Have You Heard from Johannesburg? (2010), Al Helm: Martin Luther King in Palestine (2013) and The Black Panthers: Vanguard of a Revolution (2015). Carson is founding director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford, an outgrowth of his work since 1985 as editor of King’s papers and director of the King Papers Project, which is producing a comprehensive fourteen-volume edition of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. The biographical approach of The Struggle for Freedom: A History of African Americans grew out of Carson’s vision. He has used it with remarkable results in his Stanford courses, including his online American Prophet: The Inner Life and Global Vision of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner received her BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught at Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University, and since 1990 she has been a professor of history at Haverford College. From her experience with voter registration in Mississippi in the 1960s, she became a historian to try to help correct misinformation about black Americans. Her research and teaching, all informed by her concern for the African American story, focus on family and community life, antebellum cities, Quaker history, religion and popular culture in nineteenth-century America, and the intersections between race, religion, and class. Lapsansky-Werner has published on all these topics, including Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America, 1848 to 1880 (2005, with Margaret Hope Bacon), Neighborhoods in Transition: William Penn’s Dream and Urban Reality (1994), and Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption, 1720 to 1920 (2003). She also contributed an article on Benjamin Franklin and slavery to Yale University Press’s Benjamin Franklin, In Search of a Better World (2005) and to several anthologies on the history of Pennsylvania. She hopes that The Struggle for Freedom: A History of African Americans will continue to broaden the place of African American history in the scholarly consciousness, expanding the trend toward recognizing black Americans as not just objects of public policy, but also as leaders in the multifaceted international struggle for human justice. Through stories, black Americans are presented as multidimensional, alive with their own ambitions, visions and human failings.
Gary B. Nash was born in Philadelphia and received his BA and PhD in history from Princeton University. He taught at Princeton briefly and since 1966 has been a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he teaches colonial American, revolutionary American, and African American history and directs the National Center for History in the Schools. He served as president of the Organization of American Historians in 1994 and 1995 and was Co-Director of the National History Standards Project from 1992 to 1996. Nash’s many books on early American history include Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681 to 1726 (1968); Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America (7 editions since 1974); The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (1979); Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720 to 1840 (1988); Race and Revolution (1990); Forbidden Love: The Secret History of Mixed-Race America (1999; 2nd ed., 2010); First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of History Memory (2001); Landmarks of the American Revolution (2003); The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (2005); The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (2006); Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeuz Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull (2008); Liberty Bell (2010); Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist (2017); and The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society (9 editions since 1981). Nash wanted to coauthor this book with 2 good friends and esteemed colleagues because of their common desire to bring the story of the African American people before a wide audience of students and history lovers. African American history has always had a central place in his teaching, and it has been pivotal to his efforts to bring an inclusive, multi-cultural American history into the K–12 classrooms in this nation and abroad.
