How great was the Great Society? A view from 2020

Kevin K. Gaines is the Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice, with a joint appointment in the University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of History and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. The new professorship was created to honor the legacy of Bond, the civil rights champion and former University of Virginia professor. Gaines’ current research is on the problems and projects of racial integration in the United States during and after the civil rights movement. 

He is author of Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture During the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), which was awarded the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Book Prize. 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). 

His current research is on the integrationist projects of African American activists, artists and intellectuals, interventions that redefined blackness and acknowledged the relationship of structural and ideological forms of racism to racial capitalism, patriarchy, and homophobia.

McKee is an associate professor in Presidential Studies at the Miller Center and the author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia. He is currently working on a book that examines the rise of the health care economy in American cities after World War II. He has written extensively about urban policy, including a book that explored the connections between local and federal economic, urban renewal, and antipoverty policies in Philadelphia between the 1950s and the 1980s, and has done extensive work on the Lyndon Johnson White House recordings focused on the War on Poverty, as well as on the wider development of the Great Society.

Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and one of the pioneers in the revival of American political history. Among other works, he is the author of Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—From World War II to the War on Terrorism (2010), Jimmy Carter (2010), and Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981-1989 (2010). His most recent book is The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (2015). In addition to his scholarly articles and book chapters, Zelizer is a frequent commentator in the international and national media on political history and contemporary politics.

Barnes is co-director for policy and public affairs for the Democracy Initiative, an interdisciplinary teaching, research, and engagement effort led by the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia. She is a professor of practice at the Miller Center and distinguished fellow at the UVA School of Law. During the administration of President Barack Obama, Barnes was assistant to the president and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. She was also executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and chief counsel to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee.