Randal Maurice Jelks is The Ruth N. Halls Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. Jelks was born and spent his childhood in the city of New Orleans. Jelks’s lineage in Louisiana traces back to 1830s and 1840s via his enslaved ancestors from Maryland and Virginia. He is a descendant of the Georgetown 272, in which Georgetown University sold enslaved persons that it owned to prevent its shuttering. Jelks and his mother migrated from New Orleans to Chicago where he delightfully attended South Shore High School on the city’s Southside. From there he attended the University of Michigan (BA History), McCormick Theological Seminary (Master of Divinity), and Michigan State University (PhD in Comparative Black Histories) studying under the distinguished author and historian Darlene Clark Hine.

Jelks is an award-winning author and has taught at Calvin University and the University of Kansas. He has authored four books. African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids (The University of Illinois Press, 2006), which was awarded the State History Award, University and Commercial Press, Historical Society of Michigan). Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement: A Biography (University of North Carolina Press 2012), awarded the 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award and the 2013 Literary Award, Black Caucus of the American Library Association; Faith and Struggle in the Lives of Four African Americans: Ethel Waters, Mary Lou Williams, and Eldridge Cleaver and Muhammad Ali (Bloomsbury January 2019); Letters to Martin: Meditations on Democracy in Black America  (January 2022) awarded Kansas Notable Book 2023. Jelks writings have appeared in the Boston Review, Black Perspectives, the Detroit Free Press, the Grand Rapids Press, the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Review of Books as well as other national scholarly periodicals.

Jelks has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Park Triangle, North Carolina, a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at Masaryk University, Brno Czech Republic, a visiting lecturer at University of Regensburg, American Studies (Germany) and taught at the University of Ghana, Institute for African Studies (2001 and 2007).

Jelks is also an ordained Presbyterian clergy in the Presbyterian Church USA and a member of the Presbytery of Lake Michigan. He served a now defunct congregation in  the city of Grand Rapids after graduating seminary. Jubilee Presbyterian was an interracial ministry in an African American working-class community with the mission of caring for people in life, death, and all the attending struggles of living in between.

Lastly Jelks is a documentary film producer. He has produced and contributed to Langston’s Lawrence, Garden City Kansas, as well as developing a documentary with Academy Award Winner Kevin Willmott on Langston Hughes, which is the topic of his forthcoming book My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy published by Broadleaf Books.

Sha-Shana Crichton of Crichton & Associates is Jelks literary agent

Helena Brantley Red Pencil Publicity & Marketing serves as Jelks book publicist