Keynote Speaker Biography
Dr. Daryl Michael Scott is a professor of United States history at Morgan State University and chair of the Department of History, Geography, and Museum Studies. Dr. Scott retired from Howard University, where he taught for twenty years. From 2005 until 2009, he served as chair of the department. Dr. Scott started his career at Columbia University in New York City in 1993. Afterwards, he served as Director of African American Studies at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
He researches and writes on American intellectual history, nationalism in the United States, and, currently, convict slavery since 1615. In 1998, he won the James Rawley Prize for the best book in Race Relations History for Contempt and Pity: Social Science and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996. Joining the faculty at Howard marked the beginning of his service as a member of the Executive Council of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). After his initial term, he was elected Vice President for Programs. He held that position for nine years. From 2013 to 2015, he served as the President of ASALH during its centennial celebration.
Among his accomplishments while serving on the ASALH board were redesigning the annual meeting, establishing and directing the ASALH Press, editing The Woodson Review: ASALH’s Theme Magazine, co-founding and editing Fire!!!: the Multimedia Journal of Black Studies, overseeing the redesign of the Black History Bulletin, and editing three volumes.
In 2005, he edited a version of The Mis-Education of the Negro. That same year, he discovered and edited a lost manuscript by Dr.Woodson, which ASALH published in 2008 as Carter G. Woodson’s Appeal, which served as a major fund-raiser. It was released in paperback in 2014.
Educationally, Dr. Scott is largely a product of Catholic education. In Chicago, he attended Corpus Christi grammar school and Hales Franciscan High School, but elected to leave rather than graduate from the latter. Instead, he matriculated at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. After a stint in the United States Army as a volunteer, he returned to college at Marquette University in Wisconsin, in 1984. Afterwards, he attended Stanford University, where he earned his doctorate in United States History in 1994. He studied under Carl N. Degler, who served as his adviser, and George M. Fredrickson.
Dr. Scott is originally from Chicago, where he grew up just north of Washington Park in the 1960s. He has made his home in Prince George’s County, Maryland, since the late 1990s while still working in New York and later Florida. Having grown up on the Southside of Chicago in what was then the largest African American community in the country, he finds Prince George’s an attractive, comfortable place to live in a multi-ethnic sea of black humanity in a multi-racial, black majority county.