2024 Southeast Benefit

Carol Anderson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of five books, including Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, which was awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards, and Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960. Her third book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide, won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and her fourth book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy, was long-listed for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Book Award in Non-Fiction. Her fifth book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, was a New York Times Editor’s pick, a Library Journal’s Best Social Science Books of 2021, and a Writer’s Bone’s Best Books of 2021. 

Professor Anderson has been named a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected to the American Philosophical Society and the Society of American Historians. In addition to numerous teaching awards, her research has garnered fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, National Humanities Center, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center, the University of Connecticut’s Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, the University of Chicago’s Pozen Center for Human Rights, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She’s been selected as a Presidential Scholar at Amherst College and honored with the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize from Brandeis University, the James W. C. Pennington Award from Heidelberg University in Germany, and the Ella Baker Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Anderson was a member of the US State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee, the Pulitzer Prize Committee for History, and the National Book Awards Committee in Non-Fiction. She earned her PhD in history from The Ohio State University.

Daniel Kiel is the FedEx Professor of Law at the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, where he teaches courses on constitutional law, education, voting, and property. Professor Kiel has been a member of the faculty since 2008, and he was awarded the University's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2017. Professor Kiel's scholarly work centers on inequality in the education system, particularly along lines of race, as well as constitutional questions of citizenship and justice. In addition to his varied scholarly publications, he is the author of the book The Transition: Interpreting Justice from Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas (2023) and the director of the documentary film The Memphis 13 (2011), which shares the stories of the first graders who desegregated schools in Memphis in 1961. In 2015, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to undertake comparative research on educational disparities in South Africa and was hosted during his months there at the University of the Free State.

Beyond the walls of the law school, Professor Kiel has given numerous scholarly and media presentations on issues of race and education, both locally and nationally. In 2010, he was appointed to the Shelby County Transition Planning Commission, which was charged with coordinating the largest school district merger in American history. For his scholarly and community work on schooling in Memphis, he has been cited in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Education Week and was awarded the 2013 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Human Rights Award by the University of Memphis. In addition to his academic appointment at the law school, Professor Kiel has served as an associate director and in various other capacities with the University's Benjamin Hooks Institute for Social Change, most recently in coordinating a symposium commemorating the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

Prior to entering teaching, Professor Kiel worked in private practice doing civil litigation at firms in Boston and Memphis. While in practice, he also represented criminal defendants in post-conviction matters at both the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard Law School.