Biography

Lee Sartain is Senior Lecturer in American History and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is an expert on US civil rights activism and has worked extensively on the NAACP.

Research interests

My research interests focus on the African American experience in the twentieth century civil rights struggle in the United States. In particular I am interested in the history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the longest surviving civil rights organization in the US. My research has been on race, gender, class and youth in America.  My first book, Invisible Activists, won the Jules & Francis Landry award 2007 for best book on a southern topic.  I organized a conference at Portsmouth in February 2014 for HOTCUS, Dixie’s Great War, on the South and the First World War.  An article from this conference (the NAACP and the Great War) appeared in a collected edition on the American South and the Great War in 2018 (LSU Press).  My recent research has been on youth rights activism in the 1940s and 1950s.  I have various entries in a number of encyclopedia, including the American National Biography (Enolia McMillan), the Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism (NAACP) and KnowLa (Louisiana History & Culture). My current research includes looking at the post-1960s NAACP and its association with other rights movements.