DR. LANCE HILL: AMERICAN CHARACTER

Dr. Lance Hill is the Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Researchat Tulane University. Dr. Hill worked as a community activist and labor organizer for 20 years before embarking on an academic career.

From 1989 to 1992, Dr. Hill served as the Executive Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism (LCARN), the grass roots organization that led the opposition to former Klansman David Duke’s Senate and Gubernatorial campaigns.Hill, one of the coalition’s founders, directed the organization’s extensive television, radio and direct mail campaigns.The New York Times and the New Orleans Times-Picayune credited LCARN with playing the leading role in Duke’s ultimate political demise.

In 1993, Hill co-founded the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University. Over the past 10 years the Institute’s tolerance education program-the most comprehensive project of its kind in the South—has provided training to more than 3,600 teachers from 785 schools in the Deep South. The program uses case studies of the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement to teach the causes and consequences of prejudice. With a geographic scope of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle, the Institute prides itself on successful implementing programs in rural and isolated communities that have been traditional strongholds of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups.

Dr. Hill also directs the Southern Institute’s cross-cultural communication training and research program, which teaches advanced skills to improve communication and collaboration among ethnic groups in the United States. Hill holds a PhD from Tulane University, where he has taught US History and Intercultural Communication.

His scholarly research field is the history of race relations and the radical right. He is the author of The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement(University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and "National Socialist Race Doctrine in the Political Thought of David Duke," in The Emergence of David Duke by Doug Rose (University of North Carolina Press, 1994). He has served as a consultant on several PBS documentaries on the radical right and the civil rights movement and has written extensively on racial politics in the South.

Dr. Hill resides in New Orleans with his wife of 30 years, Eileen SanJuan.

Music written and composed by Michael Houser (Door Harp album). Please visit: Houser Tribute