Faculty & Scholars*

K-12 Leader and Consultant

  • Leyna Varnum will serve as the K-12 leader for the project. She has 18 years of experience in K-12 education and is currently a high school English teacher at Isaac Bear Early College in Wilmington, NC. Leyna brings a great deal of expertise related to teaching about the 1898 coup and massacre resulting from her work with students to find undiscovered copies of The Daily Record.

Program Faculty and Scholars

  • Gwendolyn Alexis is an adjunct instructor of history and African American Studies at Cal State Fullerton and John Jay College.  She is a great granddaughter of Joshua Halsey, one of the few identified victims of Wilmington’s 1898 massacre. 

  • Felix Brooks is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

  • Elaine Brown, a spoken-word poet, is a history teacher at Bay Hill High School in California.  She is the second-great granddaughter of Joshua Halsey, one of the few identified victims of the 1898 massacre.

  • Lisa Buchanan is an Associate Professor of Education at Elon University. She previously taught in the Watson College of Education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She holds a B.S. in Elementary Education from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, a M.Ed. in Special Education from Elon University, and a Ph.D. in Teacher Education from the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Her research in teacher education is focused on preservice and in-service teachers' beliefs and decision making, social studies education, and the use of children's literature and media to teach difficult topics.

  • David Cecelski has held positions as the Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor in Documentary and American Studies at Duke University and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written extensively on civil rights and North Carolina coastal history. Known to many North Carolinians through his devotion to the public portrayal of history, Cecelski has contributed a monthly oral history series, "Listening to History," to the Raleigh News & Observer since June 1998. Cecelski, recipient of an Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights and a Walter Hines Page Award for Literature, has published widely. His books include The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (2001), Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (1994) and The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway’s Civil War (2012). He co-edited Recollections of My Slavery Days (1999) and Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (1998).

  • Kim Cook is a Professor of Sociology at UNCW. She earned her doctorate in Sociology from the University of New Hampshire in 1994. She has published articles about restorative justice, wrongful convictions, shelter services for battered women, and feminist criminology. Dr. Cook is a trauma-informed restorative justice facilitator in New Hanover County.  She has helped to organize and facilitate restorative justice training for New Hanover County Schools, is the former chair of the Board of Directors for LINC, Inc. (a prisoner reentry residential service), and is a founding board member for Healing Justice (offering peer support and policy reform for people impacted by wrongful convictions). She is currently working to collect life history interviews with descendants of the 1898 Wilmington Massacre and Coup d’Etat.

  • Jan Davidson, Cape Fear Museum Historian, holds a doctorate from the University of Delaware. She has curated numerous exhibitions and projects at the museum, including “Reflections in Black and White,” (Winner, 2016 Gold Award for Outstanding Exhibition, Southeastern Museums Conference) and the 1898 Story Map, an online exhibit launched in 2020.

  • Chris Everett is the director and producer of Wilmington on Fire, a documentary film chronicling the 1898 Coup which has been recognized as the Cucalorus Film Festival Best Documentary (2015) and the FilmSPARK Best Documentary (2016).

  • Joel Finsel is co-founder of Third Person Project with John Jeremiah Sullivan. In addition to pursuing community-focused research, he teaches in UNCW’'s Creative Writing Department and is a member of the Steering Committee for the FREED Project, a multi-year grant awarded to UNCW by the Teagle Foundation to integrate the study of the foundations of democracy into the undergraduate experience.

  • Keiran Haile is the great-great-grandson of Alexander Manly, owner and publisher of The Daily Record, which was burned down in Wilmington, North Carolina by a white supremacist mob in 1898.

  • Cedric Harrison is the founder of Support the Port and WilmingtoNColor, a Black history shuttle tour based in Wilmington, NC. He has dedicated his career to creating economic opportunities for African Americans in the Wilmington community.

  • Hasan Kwame Jeffries is an Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University where he teaches courses on the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement. He is the author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, which tells the remarkable story of the African American freedom movement in Lowndes County, Alabama, the birthplace of Black Power. He is also the editor of Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, a collection of essays by leading civil rights scholars and teachers that explores how to teach the Civil Rights Movement accurately and effectively. Dr. Jeffries also consults regularly with school districts on developing anti-racism programming. This work includes conducting professional development workshops for teachers, speaking to student assemblies, and developing inclusive curricular centered on social studies.

  • Daniel Jones is the cultural curator at the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, NC and an expert on the museum’s Boundless exhibit which commemorates the United States Colored Troops.

  • Cash Michaels is an award-winning contributing writer for papers including The Wilmington Journal, The County News in Charlotte, and The Carolina Times in Durham, NC. Michaels has also been contributing writer to The Amsterdam News in New York. Many of his stories are also carried across the nation via the  200-member National Newspaper Publishers Association.  Michaels has produced a wide range of award-winning videos, including 2014’s “Pardons of Innocence: The Wilmington Ten,” and 2010’s “Obama in NC: The Path to History.”

  • Margaret M. Mulrooney is Senior Vice Provost for Academic Programs and Equity at James Madison University.  The author of Deep Currents: Race, Place, and Memory in Wilmington NC (2018), she has published and presented widely on issues of equity and inclusion. Mulrooney, trained as a public historian, has a decades-long commitment to excavating Wilmington’s fraught history; in 1999, she and her students at UNCW developed the first walking tour of sites connected to the Wilmington Massacre and Coup.

  • Christie Norris is the director of Carolina K-12, a nonprofit organization that supports teachers through the development of curriculum and professional development opportunities.

  • Leslie Randall-Morton is Associate Director and Site Historian of the Bellamy Mansion Museum of History and Design Arts in Wilmington, NC. Trained as a public historian, she has designed tours and curated exhibits on the Bellamy Mansion’s urban slave quarters as well as the enslaved artisans and servants who built and maintained the antebellum building.

  • Donyell Roseboro is the Chief Diversity Officer at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is also a professor in the Department of Instructional Technology, Foundations and Secondary Education. Since arriving at UNCW in 2007, she has excelled at helping the Watson College of Education strengthen partnerships with hundreds of K-12 schools across southeastern North Carolina, building trust between the university and the communities served by the schools.

  • John Jeremiah Sullivan is a prize-winning author and  founder of Third Person Project, a community-driven research initiative that has been instrumental in bringing Wilmington’s history to a national audience. Third Person Project works closely with student historians; its first initiative brought together middle schoolers from across the city to locate lost or forgotten copies of the Wilmington Daily Record, the African American newspaper destroyed at the onset of the 1898 Wilmington Massacre.

  • Bertha Todd served the students of New Hanover County for 33 years. She worked first as a librarian at Williston High School and then as a school administrator at John T. Hoggard High School. During that time, she worked actively for the peaceful integration of New Hanover County Schools. Despite retiring from Hoggard High School in 1985, she continues to work towards racial reconciliation through her active leadership in the 1898 Centennial Foundation and community organizations across the Wilmington region.

  • LeRae Umfleet is a historian for the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Ms. Umfleet has conducted comprehensive research about 1898, particularly the events that preceded the coup and the lasting economic impact. At the time of the centennial anniversary of the 1898 Coup, she was commissioned by the state of North Carolina to research the event and write a full report which became the book, A Day of Blood.

  • Tara White is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.  A specialist in African American history and the Progressive Era, she is also a trained public historian holding degrees from Middle Tennessee State University and the Cooperstown Graduate Program at SUNY Oneonta. 

  • Barbara Wright is the author of Crow, a novel about a young boy living in Wilmington in 1898; it was named a National Council for the Social Studies Notable Trade Book in 2013.

  • David Zucchino is a contributing writer for The New York Times. He was awarded a 2021 Pulitzer Prize for his book, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. He was also awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his dispatches from apartheid South Africa.

*Faculty & Scholars subject to change