Professor Alridge Awarded Carter G. Woodson Scholars Medallion

Derrick P. Alridge, the Philip J. Gibson Professor of Education in the UVA School of Education and Human Development, has been awarded the 2021 Carter G. Woodson Scholars Medallion by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH).

According to the association’s website, the Carter Godwin Woodson Scholars Medallion is awarded to a scholar “whose career is distinguished through at least a decade of research, writing, and activism in the field of African American life and history.” Founded by Carter G. Woodson, ASALH is the founding organization of Black History Month.

Alridge, who has been attending ASALH since 1995, noted that the organization has played a pivotal role in his development as a scholar and activist over the past few decades.

“To receive the Woodson Scholars Medallion was unexpected, but it is also an incredible honor,” Alridge said. “I am extremely humbled. I have always looked to Carter G. Woodson as a role model for my work as an historian of Black education.”

Alridge serves as director of the UVA Center for Race and Public Education in the South and is an educational and intellectual historian, whose work examines American education, focusing on African American education and the civil rights movement. Alridge also serves as the principal investigator of the Carter G. Woodson Home Ethnographic Study (a collaboration with the National Park Service) and principal investigator for the Teachers in the Movement Project. He is an affiliate faculty member with UVA’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies.

His most recent book, The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century, was published in August. The book features essays by scholars from a multiplicity of disciplines and makes the case for the development and evolution of a distinctive system of Black thought in twentieth century America.