Adolph Reed Jr. joins the Mount Holyoke faculty as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Politics. He is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at Howard, Yale, and Northwestern Universities, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the New School for Social Research.
He has been a Carnegie Corporation Scholar of Vision (2002/3), John J. McCloy’16 Visiting Professor at Amherst College (1998/99) and the inaugural Scholar in Residence, McKenna Center for Leadership, St. Francis Xavier University, November 11-19, 2019. In 2023 he received the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Distinguished Alumnus Award, which “recognizes alumni for outstanding contributions to humankind.”
He has been recognized for his Contribution to the Field of Urban Affairs by the Urban Affairs Association and received the Norton Long Career Achievement Award given by the Urban and Local Politics section of the American Political Science Association, as well as the Charles A. McCoy Career Achievement Award given by the American Political Science Association’s Caucus for a Critical Political Science to a “progressive political scientist who has had a long, successful career as a writer, teacher, and activist.”
He was Featured International Speaker, at the invitation of the Minister of the Secretariat, at the national symposium, broadcast live on Brazilian national television, marking the tenth anniversary of the Brazilian Presidential Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality, 2013 and was Keynote speaker at the Fourth Annual Labor Fest Hawaii conference, Honolulu, HI, 2015.
He is the editor of Race, Politics and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s (Greenwood Press, 1986) and Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and our Retreat from Racial Equality (Westview, 1999) and with Kenneth W. Warren of Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought (Paradigm, 2010). He is author of The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics (Yale Press, 1986); W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism & the Color Line (Oxford University Press, 1997) Stirrings in the Jug: Black American Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), Class Notes ( New Press, 2000), a collection of his popular political writing) and most recently The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives (Verso 2022), a rumination on the last decades of the Jim Crow order. He is co-author with Walter Benn Michaels of No Politics but Class Politics (Eris & Columbia University Press 2023) and with Kenneth W. Warren of Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality (Routledge 2025) and is currently completing “When Compromises Come Home to Roost: The Decline and Transformation of the U. S. Left” (Verso).
He has been a columnist in The Progressive, The Village Voice, The New Republic and The Nation and his writing has also appeared in Dissent, Ჹ’s nonsite.org, of which he is an editorial board member, and many other academic and popular journals and magazines.
He served on the board of Public Citizen, Inc. and was a member of the Interim National Council of the Labor Party, and the executive committee of the American Association of University Professors, and he is currently on the boards of Food and Water Action and the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute (DJDI) and was an Organizer in the DJDI’s Medicare for All-South Carolina campaign and is a regular on DJDI’s Class Matters podcast — .