Jeffrey Gonda

Degree

Ph.D., Yale University, 2012

Specialties

African American history, 20th century U.S. legal, urban, political.

Courses

HST 102  American History Since 1865
HST 306  The Long Civil Rights Era
HST 401  Race and The Law

Biography

Jeffrey Gonda specializes in legal history and the history of the civil rights movement. He is the author of Unjust Deeds: The Restrictive Covenant Cases and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) which examines how the legal fight against housing discrimination in the 1940s and the landmark case of Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) helped transform civil rights litigation in the twentieth century. In 2015, Professor Gonda’s research on the Shelley case received the Supreme Court Historical Society’s prestigious Hughes-Gossett Award. He is currently working on a new book entitled No Crystal Stair: Black Women and Civil Rights Law in Postwar America which explores the largely unheralded role of African American women lawyers and litigants in the civil rights struggles of the 1940s and 1950s. He was named a Charles Warren Fellow at Harvard University in 2016 while working on this new manuscript. He received the Maxwell School’s Moynihan Award for Teaching and Research, and Syracuse University’s Meredith Teaching Recognition Award. Professor Gonda teaches a variety of courses on the history of social movements, law, sports, and race. 

Research Projects

"Home Front: The Restrictive Covenant Cases and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement"