Deborah Beckel

Born in Columbus, Georgia, Deborah Beckel grew up in the segregated South, where she was fascinated by people’s stories about their lives. She became a student leader when her Eastville, Virginia high school was racially integrated and she witnessed the dynamics of race, class, and gender discrimination. Graduating from Mount Holyoke College, Beckel received a master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in 1998 she earned a Ph.D. in history from Emory University. Her publications include Radical Reform: Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina (University of Virginia Press, 2011). Beckel’s recent essay, “Southern Labor and the Lure of Populism: Workers and Power in North Carolina,” is in Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power, edited by Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt (University Press of Florida, 2018). She works as Adult Services Librarian at Wilkes County Public Library in North Carolina.