Crystal R. Sanders, associate professor of African American studies at Emory University in Atlanta, has recently received two awards for her new book, A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). Dr. Sanders was awarded the 2025 Pauli Murray Book Prize from the African American Intellectual History Society and the 2025 Outstanding Publication Award from the American Educational Research Association.
A Forgotten Migration explores Black southerners’ efforts to secure post-baccalaureate education during the era of legal segregation. To comply with the separate but equal doctrine prevailing at that time, 16 southern and border states paid for their Black citizens to go out of state to pursue post-baccalaureate degree programs rather than establish segregated graduate programs for African Americans. In telling this story, Dr. Sanders also documents the decades-long state underfunding of public Black institutions of higher education.
An Emory faculty member since 2022, Dr. Sanders previously spent a decade at Pennsylvania State University, where she directed the Africana Research Center. Her research and teaching interests include African American history, Black women’s history, civil rights history, and the history of Black education. In addition to A Forgotten Migration, she is the author of A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
Dr. Sanders is a cum laude graduate of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where she double-majored in history and public policy. She holds a master’s degree in history and a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.