Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, a native North Carolinian and the C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, discusses her revealing new book, *Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950*, which looks at forgotten black and white southern activists, whose courageous work in the face of Jim Crow segregation laws, helped lay the foundation for the later civil rights movement.
Glenda Gilmore's Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 came out in January 2008 from W. W. Norton Company. Her book Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1986-1920 won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the James A. Rawley Prize, the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, and Yale's Heyman Prize. She edited Who Were the Progressives (2002) and co-edited Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (2001). Gilmore is at work on a history of the United States in the twentieth century with her co-author Thomas Sugrue of the University of Pennsylvania. Gilmore has appeared frequently on NPR and in PBS Documentaries. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Radcliffe at Harvard University, and, in 2006-2007, was the John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992. A recipient of Yale's Graduate Mentoring Award, Gilmore offers graduate reading and research courses in 20th century political and social history, African-American history after 1865, and the history of the New South. She teaches undergraduate courses on African-American history, the Progressive Era, and lectures on US Political and Social History, 1900-1945.