Kalil White, The Bottom
Kalil White is originally from Leesville, Louisiana and is the eldest daughter of 10 children. She realized at an early age that she had a passion for nature and community development. She received her Bachelors of Science in Biology with a concentration in Environmental Sustainability from Georgia Southern University in 2018 and her Masters of Science in Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communications from University of Tennessee in 2021. During her grad program she was recognized for her academic achievements by being inducted into the Gamma Sigma Delta Agriculture Honor Society in Spring 2020. Her experience includes serving within several nonprofit organizations that are dedicated to environmental sustainability, community outreach, and serving marginalized communities. Kalil's lifetime goal is to earn a Nobel Peace Prize in Environmental Sustainability throughout global marginalized communities. She always prides herself on being the person she needed in her community growing up.
Latoya E. Eaves, Ph.D.
Dr. LaToya Eaves is a proud North Carolinian. Her Southern upbringing informs her research, which centers questions of power and place, asking where, how, and why social and political processes impact communities and individuals unequally and to understand how geographic tools might be employed as strategies for understanding inequalities better. Her work is situated in Black geographies, queer geographies, feminist geography, Black feminisms, and Southern studies. Eaves is Associate Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Tennessee.
Her commitment to diverse experiences and productions of the U.S. South and beyond is reflected in her prolific record of publishing in various journals, including Southeastern Geographer; Gender, Place, and Culture; Journal of Geography in Higher Education; Dialogues in Human Geography; Geoforum; ACME; and Progress in Human Geography. She is also an editor of two anthologies, Spatial Futures: Difference and the Post-Anthropocene (forthcoming in 2024) and Activist Feminist Geographies (2023). In addition, she is working on two book manuscripts: Unbounded: Notes on Southern Black Feminist Geographies and Something Special: The Place of Queerness in the U.S. South.
Recipient of numerous awards including the Ronald F. Abler Distinguished Service Honors for her transformative impact on the American Association of Geographers (AAG) through her commitment to Black Geographies and the 2022 Academic Advancement Award from the Tennessee LGBT+ College Conference, she also recently received a half million dollar National Science Foundation grant for a collaborative project on Museums, Public Pedagogy, and Black Geographies in the United States. In addition, she was named to the 2023 Class of AAG Fellows, a title bestowed for life. Her profoundly interdisciplinary contributions reflect her experiences, training, and teaching across Africana Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Geography.
Brandon K. Winford, Ph.D.
Dr. Brandon K. Winford is an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a historian of late nineteenth and twentieth century United States and African American history with areas of specialization in civil rights and black business history. Winford is the author of John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights (University Press of Kentucky, 2020). He is from Mooresville, North Carolina and received his B.A. and M.A. in history from North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina, as well as his Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Professor Winford is the cofounder of the Fleming-Morrow Endowment in African American History, named in honor of two pioneer black professors in the UTK College of Arts and Sciences.
Winford is the co-winner of the 2020 Lillian Smith Book Award, presented by the Southern Regional Council, University of Georgia Libraries, Dekalb County Public Library, Georgia Center for the Book, and Piedmont College. His book was a finalist for the 2021 Hagley Prize in Business History, sponsored jointly by the Hagley Museum and Library and the Business History Conference. He is the recipient of the 2019 Junior Diversity Leadership Award from the UTK College of Arts and Sciences and the 2020 Hardy Liston, Jr. Symbol of Hope Award. He is currently working on a book manuscript about the history of black banking in the American South since 1865, which considers black banks as critical arteries wherever they existed in black communities across the region. These institutions were in short supply relatively speaking but proved critical to thriving local economies. Moreover, they were valuable resources in facilitating black consumerism, entrepreneurship, homeownership, and institution building so black people could participate in areas of the economy previously closed off to them.
John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights combines black business and civil rights history to explain how economic concerns shaped the goals and objectives of the black freedom struggle. Winford focuses on the black business activism of banker and civil rights lawyer John Hervey Wheeler (1908-1978). Wheeler graduated from Morehouse College in 1929, and then moved to Durham, North Carolina where he landed a job as a bank teller with the Mechanics and Farmers Bank (M&F Bank), one of the nation's largest black-owned banks. In 1952, he became president of M&F Bank, a sister institution to the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (N.C. Mutual). Between the 1950s and 1960s, Wheeler was the Tar Heel State's most influential black power broker and among the top civil rights figures in the South. Winford's new book examines one of the leading black businesspeople in the United States in one of the country's most well known "Black Wall Streets."