The Dan Blue Endowed Chair

In 2001, the Political Science Department was blessed with a generous donation from C.D. Spangler and his wife Meredith Spangler to honor the contributions of Daniel T. Blue, an alumnus of NCCU and the first African American Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives from 1991–1995.  The Endowed Chair is to support a distinguished scholar who can foster student research in a significant way.

Dr. Gladys Mitchell-Walthour is the Dan Blue Endowed Chair of Political Science at North Carolina Central University. Dr. Mitchell-Walthour studies racial politics in Brazil, affirmative action, and the intersection of social welfare, race, and gender. Her research has found that a sense of Black group identity has a positive relationship with voting for Black politicians and supporting affirmative action.

Her current book, “The Politics of Survival: The Political Opinions of Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the USA” will be published by Columbia University Press in 2023. She finds that Black women's social welfare beneficiaries engage in a politics of survival by supplementing their benefits through informal labor to sustain their families and that they resist various forms of discrimination including racial, gender and class discrimination.

She is the author of “The Politics of Blackness” (2018, Cambridge University Press). She co-edited the volume “Knowledge Production  (2016, Palgrave MacMillan) with Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman. She also co-edited the volume “Brazil’s New Racial Politics” with Bernd Reiter (2010, Lynne Rienner Press).

Mitchell-Walthour is the past president of the Brazil Studies Association (2018–2020) and has been the national co-coordinator of the US Network for Democracy in Brazil since 2019. She is a board member of the Washington Brazil Office. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including the Fulbright (2022), as well as postdoctoral fellowships at Duke University and Johns Hopkins University, and was a Lemann Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University (2014). She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago, an M.P.P. from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and a B.A. from Duke University.

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