BIO

Melissa N. Stuckey is an award winning associate professor of African American history and Director of Public History at the University of South Carolina. A specialist in early twentieth century black activism, she is author of several book chapters, journal, and magazine articles including, “Freedom on Her Own Terms: California M. Taylor and Black Womanhood in Boley, Oklahoma” published in This Land is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma, 1870s to 2010s (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021) and  “Boley, Indian Territory: Exercising Freedom in the All Black Town,” published in 2017 in the Journal of African American History. Stuckey is currently completing her first book, entitled “All Men Up”: Seeking Freedom in the All-Black Town of Boley, Oklahoma, which interrogates the black freedom struggle in Oklahoma as it took shape in the state’s largest all-black town.

Committed to engaging the public in important conversations about African American history, Stuckey has been awarded over two million dollars in grants from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the National Park Service (NPS) to rehabilitate a historic Rosenwald Practice School building and Principal's House on the campus of Elizabeth City State University in northeastern North Carolina and to support the exploration of ways to preserve Northeastern North Carolina’s Rosenwald school history.

She is also spearheading the mapping of segregation-era African American businesses in Elizabeth City’s historic Shepard Street-Road Street neighborhood and leading local African American cemetery preservation work.  

Stuckey was also a contributing historian on the NEH-funded “Free and Equal Project” in Beaufort, South Carolina which interprets the story of Reconstruction for a national and an international audience and senior historical consultant to the Coltrane Group, a non-profit organization in Oklahoma committed to helping these towns survive in the 21st century.

Dr. Stuckey earned her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and her Ph.D. from Yale University. She has previously worked at the University of Oregon and Elizabeth City State University.