Cornelius Bynum
Director of African American Studies and Associate Professor of History
Dr. Cornelius L. Bynum is the Director of African American Studies and an Associate Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi.
Research Interests
Dr. Cornelius Bynum’s research focuses on race and racial identity, Black protest politics, social reform movements and Black people’s freedom struggles, and the American labor movement and Black workers. It centers on Black peoples’ determination to survive, resist, and dismantle White supremacy and racial oppression in the United States across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, specifically emphasizing how they navigated the perils of segregation and racial violence, defined and defended themselves and their collective humanity, and critiqued the meaning of social justice, citizenship, and democracy against the backdrop of pervasive American racism. Rather than framing this endeavor primarily in terms of resistance and resilience, his work determines to situate Black people’s quest for freedom at the heart of the fundamental American dilemma of reconciling the promises and pitfalls of the nation’s democratic ideals.
His first book, A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights (University of Illinois Press, 2010), examines the nature and meaning of social justice, the role of radical politics in Black peoples’ struggle for freedom, and the meanings of both citizenship and democracy in the face of Jim Crow; it explores specific links between Randolph’s evolving ideas about genuine social justice, interest group politics, mass action, and the complicated interaction between race and class for Black workers. This work illustrates Randolph’s central role in crafting protest strategies and tactics that transformed the postwar freedom struggle African Americans undertook.
His edited volume with Derrick P. Alridge and James B. Stewart, The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century(University of Illinois Press, 2021) further expounds on how Black people in the twentieth century have defined and defended themselves and their collective humanity and taken direct action – from mass action social justice campaigns, community building, and political mobilization – to affect broad racial advancement.
He is currently working on a new monograph titled, “Black Life in the Bluegrass: A Remarkable History of African American Prosperity in Madison County, Kentucky,” that extends his thematic focus on Black people’s strategic responses to racism and White supremacy by chronicling the ways that African Americans in Madison County, Kentucky, effectively maneuvered around and through racial barriers both before and after the Civil War to create better lives for themselves and their families.
Biography
Dr. Bynum completed all of his degrees at the University of Virginia (’93, ’96,’04) and taught History and directed African American Studies at Purdue University before coming to Ole Miss in Summer 2025.
Education
B.A. History, University of Virginia Main Campus (1993)
M.A. History, University of Virginia Main Campus (1996)
Ph.D. History, University of Virginia Main Campus (2004)