Yasuhiro Katagiri

A native of Tokyo, Yasuhiro Katagiri was a Fulbright Graduate Scholar from Japan at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg in the early 1990s, and the university's Mississippi Oral History Program holds his civil rights-related oral histories that he conducted in the state and donated to the institution. In addition, Katagiri's lengthy oral history (done in 1994) with James H. Meredith, an iconic civil rights activist, is housed at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, the University of Mississippi's Department of Archives and Special Collections in Oxford, and Mississippi State University's Archives and Special Collections in Mississippi State. He received a Doctor of Philosophy degree with a concentration in American History and Government from International Christian University in Tokyo. A Japanese historian of the American South, the civil rights movement, and white southerners' Massive Resistance to the civil rights movement, Katagiri authored _The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States' Rights_, for which he was awarded the Mississippi Historical Society's Richard A. McLemore Book Prize (presently Book-of-the-Year Award) in 2002 as its first non-North American recipient. Ten years in the making, his second scholarly book, _Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace: Civil Rights and Anticommunism in the Jim Crow South_, was published by the Louisiana State University Press in 2014. Katagiri's more recently published writings include "The Three Rs of Louisiana Segregation: Rainach, Race, and Reds" (with Michael S. Martin) appeared in the Louisiana Historical Association's quarterly journal, _Louisiana History_ 65 (Winter 2024): 5-66; and "Not Lost in Time: The Clyde Kennard Incident in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, during the Civil Rights Era and the Southern State's Long-Delayed Atonement for Its Dark Journey," _Center for Fundamental Education Review_ [Kyushu Sangyo University, Fukuoka, Japan] 16 (2026): 1-36. As a full-time faculty member, he has taught American history and American studies at three private universities in Japan for over three decades since 1994. Katagiri currently resides in Fukuoka, Japan, and is the father of three grown-up children.