John David Smith is Graduate Alumni Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the M.A. Program in Public History at North Carolina State University. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including An Old Creed for the New South (1985), the multivolume work Anti-Black Thought, 1863–1925 (1993), and Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro (2000). In 1998–99, he served as the Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the Amerika Institut, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich, Germany.