Lawrence N. Powell teaches southern history, race relations, and Holocaust studies at Tulane University in New Orleans. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1976. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he has published books and articles on Reconstruction history and Louisiana politics, including New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction, which has just been reissued by Fordham University Press, and the text for the Louisiana Capitols: The Power and the Beauty. He has just completed a biography of a New Orleans Holocaust survivor, titled Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana, published by UNC Press in May, 2000, which won the Lillian Smith Book Prize from the Southern Regional Council for 2000 and the Kemper and Leila Williams Prize for 2000 from the Louisiana Historical Association. It was also named by Booklist as one of the ten best Holocaust books of the year and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the category of the Holocaust.
Dr. Powell was vice-chair of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, which he helped found, and a board member of the Amistad Research Center. At present he is the executive committee chairperson of the Southern Institute for Education and Research. He was the chairman of the Amistad Center's 1989 National Civil Rights Conference, "A Continuing American Dilemma" and of the 1996 Plessy Centennial Conference "When the Future Was the Past." He has been an expert witness in several federal voting rights cases in Louisiana. Currently, he is the executive director of the Tulane-Xavier National Center for the Urban Community, whose mission is to improve the living conditions and life chances of public housing residents in New Orleans. It also administers the city's major competitive Welfare-to-Work grant from the U.S. Department of Labor In 1998 he received the "George Washington Lucas Community Service Award" from the New Orleans branch of the NAACP. In 1999 he was named 'Louisiana Humanist of the Year' by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.
He is married to the former Diana Skirven. They have one son, Justin, 27-years-old, and a new granddaughter.