Derrick P. Alridge

Professor and Director, CRPES

• Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University, 1997
• M.Ed., Winthrop University, 1992
• B.A., Winthrop College, 1987

Derrick P. Alridge is Professor of Education and an affiliate faculty member in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies. An educational and intellectual historian, Alridge’s work examines American education with foci in African American education and the civil rights movement. He is the author of The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History (2008) and co-editor, with James B. Stewart and V.P. Franklin, of Message in the Music: Hip-Hop, History, and Pedagogy (2011). Alridge is currently writing The Hip-Hop Mind: Ideas, History, and Social Consciousness (University of Wisconsin Press) and is co-editor, with Neil Bynum and James B. Stewart, of The Black Intellectual Tradition in the United States in the Twentieth Century (forthcoming, University of Illinois Press). He has published numerous articles in journals, such as History of Education Quarterly, The Journal of African American History, Teachers College Record, Educational Researcher, and The Journal of Negro Education.

Alridge serves as an associate editor for The Journal of African American History and is on the editorial board of the African American Intellectual History Society's Black Perspectives.

A former middle and high school social studies and history teacher, Alridge is also a former fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, former postdoctoral fellow of the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation, and he serves as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He is a 2016 recipient of the Lyle Spencer Research Award for his scholarship on teachers’ activism during the civil rights era and a 2018 recipient of UVA’s John T. Casteen, III Diversity - Equity - Inclusion Leadership Award.

Alridge is the founder, director, and Principal Investigator of Teachers in the Movement, an oral history project, founding director of the Center for Race and Public Education in the South, and Principal Investigator of the Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site – Ethnographic Resource Study with the National Park Service. Alridge is also a key part of the new initiative launched in the fall of 2018 to launch a program designed to help teachers increase racial, religious and ethnic inclusion in students from kindergarten to college. See Professor Alridge’s article on Teachers in the Movement.

Op-Eds and Commentaries

The Washington Post | June 19, 2019 | The Hidden Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement

Black Perspectives | June 14, 2019 | On Education and African American Intellectual History

Education Post | February 1, 2019 | We Cannot Go Another Month Without Teachers Knowing Black History

2012 Walter N. Ridley Lecture 

• Program Area
• Research Center