Diary of a Historian

dr. christina j. thomas

I am an interdisciplinary scholar passionate about developing and supporting public history projects. As a community historian, I collaborate with local communities to preserve their rich history through archival and digital initiatives. 

I earned my Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University and hold master’s degrees from Johns Hopkins and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I also received a B.A. in History from Messiah University, which recently awarded me its 2025 Young Alumnus Achievement Award.

My research primarily focuses on the history of civil rights, education, and Black women’s activism throughout the twentieth century. Currently, I am working on projects that explore early Black childhood education, specifically through the emergence of Project Head Start in Mississippi. My first project—“What Shall We Teach Our Students Who Are Black?”—traces the intellectual development of early childhood educator Geraldine Wilson (1931-1986) and her activism with Head Start programs in Mississippi and New York. My second project examines the first eighteen months of Friends of Children of Mississippi, a grassroots early childhood initiative founded in 1966. By combining biography, archival research, and oral histories, this book details the origins of this organization, which served nearly 2,000 children without federal support. My research has been supported by the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript Archives and Rare Book Library at Emory University and the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, where I am serving as the 2023-2025 Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Scholar. 

I also serve as the community archivist for the Freedom Information Service (FIS) Library in Jackson, Mississippi, and teach justice-impacted youth at a local prison school. The FIS Library was established sixty years ago through the grassroots archival efforts of Jan Hillegas, a civil rights veteran who rescued civil rights records from the central office of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). I have spent the past two years organizing and processing this extensive archive, securing funding for materials and research assistants from Rhodes College and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. I use this archive in the classroom, teaching justice-impacted youth about the Mississippi Movement through primary sources, documentaries, and oral histories with civil rights veterans. The students have created poster exhibits for National History Day, and in 2024, they became the first from a prison facility to participate in the national competition. For this work, the Mississippi Humanities Council honored me as its 2025 Humanities Scholar of the Year and awarded me the 2025 Outstanding Dedication Award from the Youthful Offenders Unit.