Keynote Speaker

The Center for Urban and Higher Education is pleased to present Dr. Charles M. Payne as the keynote speaker for the 2011 Summer institute:  Transforming Urban Schools: Sharing Multiple Voices.

Dr. Payne is the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, where he is also an affiliate of the Urban Education Institute. His interests include urban education and school reform, social inequality, social change and modern African American history. He is the author of Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure in Urban Education (1984) and I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (1995). The latter has won awards from the Southern Regional Council, Choice Magazine, the Simon Wisenthal Center, and the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America. He is co-author of Debating the Civil Rights Movement (1999) and co-editor of Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950 (2003).

Payne was founding director of the Urban Education Project in Orange, New Jersey, a nonprofit community center that broadens educational experiences for urban youngsters. He has taught at Southern University, Williams College, Northwestern University and Duke University. He has won several teaching awards, and at Northwestern, he held the Charles Deering McCormick Chair for Teaching Excellence and at Duke, the Sally Dalton Robinson Chair for excellence in teaching and research. Payne holds a bachelor's degree in Afro-American Studies from Syracuse University and a doctorate in Sociology from Northwestern.