Newswise — Komozi Woodard is an expert in African American history, politics, and culture, with emphasis on the black freedom movement, U.S. urban history and ghetto formation, public policy and persistent poverty, oral history, and the experience of anti-colonial movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
He is author of A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics and a number of reviews, chapters, and essays in journals, anthologies, and an encyclopedia. He is editor of The Black Power Movement, Part I: Amiri Baraka, from Black Arts to Black Radicalism and Beyond; Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South. He is a former news editor, former research associate at the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University, reviewer for American Council of Learned Societies, adviser to the Algebra Project and PBS documentaries Eyes on the Prize II and America's War on Poverty.
Before his academic career, Dr. Woodard was a political activist, economic development advisor, and director of a grassroots urban planning institution in Newark, New Jersey that put together housing and community development directed by the local community. He began teaching when he put together a Liberation School for SNCC in 1968. He has taught in progressive movements, communities, and prisons since then. Komozi Woodard joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Newark's Weequahic High School.
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