Executive Director
Southern Institute for Education and Research
Dr. Lance Hill is the Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research, a tolerance education and race relations research center based at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Hill holds a Ph.D. in history from Tulane University, where he has taught US History and Intercultural Communication. His scholarly research field is the history of race relations, the radical right and ethnic group trauma. He is the author of The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and The Civil Rights Movement(University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Hill was a community organizer for fifteen years before embarking on an academic career. From 1989-1992, he served as 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. One of the coalition's founders, Hill directed LCARN's research program and extensive media campaigns. The New Orleans Times-Picayune credited LCARN as having "much of the responsibility" for Duke's defeat in the 1990 Senate campaign.
In 1993, Hill co-founded the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University, a race and ethnic relations center. The Institute's tolerance education program-the most comprehensive project of its kind in the South-has provided training to more than 4,000 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.
Hill is the principal trainer for the Southern Institute's cross-cultural communication program which teaches skills to improve communication and collaboration among ethnic groups in the United States. In the aftermath of Katrina, Hill has focused his work on collective trauma and racial healing and reconciliation work in New Orleans and displaced communities. He has helped design trauma and community healing trainings and course curricula for the School of Social Work at Southern University at New Orleans.
Hill brings a unique perspective to the analysis of the impact of hurricane Katrina; he is not only an expert on the history of race relations in the Deep South, but he also remained in New Orleans throughout hurricanes Katrina and Rita where he participated in community-organized humanitarian relief work. Hill has published a series of commentaries in local and national publications on his experiences during the rescue and race and equity in issues in the recovery. He has frequently been cited in national media on post-Katrina race relations in New Orleans, including The New York Times, Time Magazine, ABC News and BBC News.
Lance Hill, in the Southern Institute car, brings relief supplies to thousand of stranded New Orleanians at the Morial Convention Center during Hurricane Katrina.
