MORNING SPEAKER

Dr. Melissa N. Stuckey is an award-winning professor and scholar of African American history at Elizabeth City State University (ECSU). Her research interests center on the role of African American institutions in the struggle for Black freedom and civil rights. She is leading several African American history and historic preservation projects, including a National Park Service- and Institute for Museum and Library Services- funded rehabilitation and repurposing of ECSU’s historic Rosenwald School building and Principal’s House; the mapping of segregation-era African American businesses in Elizabeth City’s historic Shepard Street-Road Street neighborhood; and local African American cemetery preservation work. A specialist in early twentieth century Black activism, she is author of several articles and book chapters, including “Boley, Indian Territory: Exercising Freedom in the All-Black Town,” published in 2017 in the Journal of African American History and “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). Dr. 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.