Melvin Patrick Ely

Historian, Author, Teacher

Melvin Patrick Ely (the family name rhymes with really) writes and teaches about the history of African Americans and of the South. In his books, opinion pieces, and public appearances, he chronicles the lives that Black Americans built for themselves as well as the ways Black and white folk have interacted and thought about one another.

Ely's book, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War, won the Bancroft Prize, the Beveridge Award for the year's best book on the history of the Americas, the Wesley-Logan Prize for best volume on the African diaspora, and other awards. The work follows the history of Black people in one Virginia county who were freed long before the Civil War.

Annette Gordon-Reed praised Ely's "brilliant job of detective work" in Israel on the Appomattox. Edward L. Ayers wrote that Ely "recreated an entire world in a forgotten corner of the slave South—a world whose people emerge from a dark past to stand before us in sharp relief and help us understand the American South in a new and more profound way." →

Ely has also written The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon. There he tells the story of the spectacularly popular daily radio comedy/drama in which two white men wrote and voiced the roles of Black participants in the Great Migration to a northern city. Ely shows how the radio serial, and its successor on TV in the 1950s, won the admiration of racial liberals and racists alike and divided the Black community, becoming a kind of Rorschach test that reveals much about American racial attitudes and behavior in the mid-20th century.

Melvin Ely has long been recognized as a path-breaker in American social and cultural history. Lawrence W. Levine lauded him for writing "wonderfully original" books, which "upset facile assumptions" and enable readers "to take a deeper look at aspects of our past and our culture that we thought we fully understood." C. Vann Woodward credited Ely's writings with "bring[ing] new and refreshing subtlety and complexity to our understanding of American racial attitudes, Black as well as white."

Ely, whose family come from Virginia and Tennessee, was born and grew up in Richmond. He now lives in that city with his wife, historian Jennifer R. Loux, and their son. He is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Humanities and Professor of History and Africana Studies at the College of William & Mary. For his work there, Ely received the Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award.

Earlier, Ely taught at Yale University, where he won prizes both for teaching excellence and for outstanding research and publication. He has also taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at Leiden University in The Netherlands. He has spoken in Chile and in Cyprus and delivered a lecture for Black History Month before the staff of the Executive Office of the President of the United States.

Both of Melvin Ely's books were reviewed on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review. An academic conference was held at the Newberry Library in Chicago in 2007 to discuss the significance of Israel on the Appomattox as a paradigm-shifter. He has been interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and Tavis Smiley, on the Voice of America, BET, MSNBC, and on dozens of other radio and TV stations.

Ely has been featured on TV’s History Detectives, and on C-SPAN multiple times. He has given interviews and written opinion pieces for periodicals including Le Monde, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, and the Montreal Gazette. The topics of those pieces include US Civil War re-enactments, how “Washington” became an iconic Black family name, racist photos in a Virginia Governor’s old school yearbook, the character of Apu on TV's The Simpsons, and separatism/secessionism in the US, Canada, and Cyprus. Ely wrote a back-page editorial for Education Week about the issue of removing Confederate monuments—a subject that has great resonance for him as a native of Richmond.

Ely wrote a chapter for Gary Nash, Alfred Young, and Ray Raphael’s book, Revolutionary Founders. He has contributed to the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, the American Heritage Encyclopedia of American History, the Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History, the Encyclopedia of the Great Depression, the Encyclopedia of Chicago, Encyclopedia Virginia, and the Dictionary of Virginia Biography. He served for a number of years as director of the editorial board of the University of Virginia Press.

Melvin Ely has shared his expertise through committees and campaigns seeking equality for Black Americans and for LGBTQ people at Yale, at William & Mary, in the United Methodist Church, and elsewhere. He shares the view of the great scholar and human rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, who believed that the struggle for equal rights and humane values finds its best prospect for success when it is underpinned by rigorous inquiry into the world as it is and has been.