About
Melanie S. Morrison is the author of five books, including Murder on Shades Mountain: The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham (Duke University Press, 2018) and she has written more than fifty articles for American and Dutch periodicals. Her next book, Becoming Trustworthy White Allies, will be published in the fall of 2025 by Duke University Press.
Melanie is currently engaged in intensive research and writing about her ancestors in Montevallo, Alabama, who accumulated wealth from two systems of theft: the violent dispossession of Native people from their homelands and the enslavement of African Americans.
As a racial justice educator, Melanie has thirty years of experience designing and facilitating transformational group process. She has served as executive director of Allies for Change, a national network of anti-oppression educators, and as director of the Leaven Center, a retreat and study center in Michigan dedicated to nurturing the relationship between spirituality and social justice. In 1994, she co-founded Doing Our Own Work, an intensive anti-racism program for white people that has attracted hundreds of participants from all across North America.
Currently, Melanie is a speaker with the Alabama Humanities Alliance Road Scholars program, and she serves as a research consultant for the Montevallo Legacy Project.
As a United Church of Christ pastor, she served three congregations; two in Michigan and one in the Netherlands. She served as consultant to the United Church of Christ's Sacred Conversation on Race, a national initiative launched in April 2008. As adjunct faculty, she has taught anti-racism intensives at Chicago Theological Seminary and Methodist Theological School in Ohio.
She has a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School and a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. She lives in Durham, North Carolina with her spouse, April Allison.
