In conversation with Mia Bay

Chad L. Williams is the author of Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era, winner of the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians. The Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University, he has earned fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Ford Foundation, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He is the co-editor of Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism and Racial Violence, and has contributed articles and opinion pieces to a variety of publications, including The Washington Post, Time, and The Atlantic. In The Wounded World, Williams draws from a deep pool of source material to recount the story of W. E. B. Du Bois’ disillusionment with his country for its betrayal of Black American veterans of World War I.

A scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural and social history, Mia Bay is the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at University of Pennsylvania. Her books include The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925; To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells; and Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, winner of the Bancroft Prize. She is currently finishing a book on the history of African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson.