Melton McLaurin

Melton McLaurin grew up in North Carolina and later attended college at East Carolina University. He received an MA in history, and later a Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina, where his research focused on the Southern cotton industry during the Reconstruction era. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, he worked as an instructor at the University of South Carolina and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington in 1977, and was made a professor emeritus in 2004. He’s published many well-received books, including Knights of Labor in the South (1978), about the union movement, and The Marines of Montford Point (2007), about the history of black marines.