Jakobi Williams

Dr. Jakobi Williams is the Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, and he holds a joint appointment in the Department of History at Indiana University-Bloomington.  He is a Civil Rights, Black Power, Social Justice, and African American history scholar.  He has provided hundreds of invited lectures domestically and abroad on the subjects of Civil Rights and social justice movements.  Dr. Williams serves as a consultant regarding Civil Rights issues and history for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Southern Poverty Law Center, The National Civil Rights Museum, The National Humanities Center, The Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and the Kairos-Center for Religion, Rights, and Social Justice—which helped to found the New Poor People’s Campaign led by Rev. Barber.  His most recent book, From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago, was published by the University of North Carolina Press under the prestigious John Hope Franklin Series and the book was the foundation for the script to the multi-Oscar award winning Warner Brothers film, Judas and the Black Messiah.  His other peer reviewed publications have appeared in the Journal for Civil and Human Rights; Black Perspectives; Black Women, Gender, and Families; Journal of Pan African Studies; University of Georgia Press; University of Wisconsin Press; and the New Press.  His work can also be found in Jacobin Magazine, Tikkun, Mother Jones, Gawker, Vox, and the Indianapolis Star.  Dr. Williams has appeared in dozens of media programs in radio, television, newspaper, and podcast formats.  A brief list includes, NPR, NBC News, Time, Vox, the National Humanities Center’s Nerds in the Woods Podcast and Humanities in Class Webinar Series, and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Hard History Podcast and Learning for Justice Series.  Dr. Williams most recent awards include the Mellon Foundation funded Black Metropolitan Research Consortium fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the National Humanities Center fellowship, and the Big Ten Academic Alliance-Academic Leadership Program award.  He received his BA in History from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, his MA in African American Studies and PhD in History both from UCLA.  He has also held positions at UCLA, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Kentucky.