Linda Reed
Associate Professor (United States, African American)
543 Agnes Arnold Hall
Ph: (713) 743-3092
Fax: (713) 743-3216
lreed@uh.edu

Dr. Linda Reed has established herself as a noted scholar in the field of African American history. She has received fellowships from the University of North Carolina, the University of Michigan, the Ford Foundation, and Princeton University. Reed received her M.A. from the University of Alabama, Birmingham and her Ph.D. from Indiana University, Bloomington.

Her book, Simple Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938-1963, further enhanced her reputation. Concentrating on the forgotten years of the civil rights movement, the period preceding the Montgomery bus boycott, the book examines a small group of southern white and black liberals who challenged the racial politics that denied blacks decent wages and a role in southern politics. Professor Reed is also co-editor, along with Darlene Clark Hine and Wilma King, of "We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible": A Reader in Black Women’s History. Both books won major prizes. Professor Reed also served nine years as the Director of the University of Houston’s African American Studies Program. Between 2001 and 2003, Reed was the National Director for the Association of Black Women Historians.

Teaching:
Dr. Reed teaches courses in America to l865, America since l865) and Blacks in the Western Hemisphere. She also teaches courses in Women in the Civil Rights Movement, Desegregation of the South, and African American Women in Slavery and Freedom. Her graduate courses include Introduction to Graduate Studies in U.S. History and Transformation of the South, 1880-1980.

Research:
Professor Reed is currently doing research on manuscripts titled "Black Women in America,1619-2001" (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers), "I'm Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: The Life and Times of Fannie Lou Hamer," a biography of the influential Mississippi civil rights activist, and "America's Past in Global Perspective".

Selected Publications:
Simple Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938-1963 (Indiana Univ. Press, 1991), a study on the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Southern Conference Educational Fund. Winner of the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award, October 1992, from the ABWH. Available in paperback, fall 1994

“From Freedom to Freedom: The Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement in Historical Perspective,” (Proquest Information and Learning Group, Forthcoming).

“The Brown Decision: Its Long Anticipation and Lasting Influence,” Journal of Southern History: LXX May 2004, pp. 337-342. (Solicited essay as part of a scholarly forum in commemoration of the Brown decision after 50 years.)

“Fannie Lou Hamer,” biographical entry in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary Completing the Twentieth Century, ed. by Susan Ware(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 68-71.

“Fannie Lou Hamer: A Mississippi Voice for American Democracy” in Mississippi Women of Achievement, Volume I, ed. by Elizabeth A. Payne, Martha Swain, and Marjorie Spruill (University of Georgia Press, 2003).
"Fannie Lou Hamer: New Ideas for the Civil Rights Movement and American Democracy," in The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights-Era South (University Press of Mississippi, 2002).

"Mary McLeod Bethune," "The Southern Conference Movement: The Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Southern Conference Educational Fund" in The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia, ed. by Maurine H. Beasley, Holly C. Shulman, and Henry R. Beasley (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001).

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