Presidential leadership and race

Kevin K. Gaines is the Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice at the University of Virginia and a Miller Center senior fellow. He is author of Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin book prize of the American Studies Association. His book American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (UNC Press, 2006) was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Gaines is a past president of the American Studies Association (2009–10). While at the University of Michigan, he was the director of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies from 2005–010.  

Russell Riley, co-chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program, is the White Burkett Miller Center Professor of Ethics and Institutions. He is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on elite oral history interviewing and the contemporary presidency. He has logged more than 1,500 hours of confidential interviews with senior members of the White House staff, cabinet officers, and foreign leaders back to the days of the Carter and Reagan Administrations.

Risa Goluboff, a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, is dean of the University of Virginia School of Law and a nationally renowned legal historian whose scholarship and teaching focuses on American constitutional and civil rights law, especially their historical development in the 20th century. In addition to serving as dean, Goluboff is the Arnold H. Leon Professor of Law and a professor of history at UVA. Prior to joining the Law School in 2002, Goluboff clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court.