Melanie S. Morrison

Melanie S. Morrison ‘78 M.Div. 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 newest book, Letters from Old Screamer Mountain, was published in the fall of 2021 by RCWMS 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 Black 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.

Melanie has been a keynote speaker at national and regional conferences addressing issues of racial, disability, and sexual justice.

She has a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School and a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Groningen.