Human Rights and Society

Dr. Tondra L. Loder-Jackson holds a primary appointment as Professor of Educational Foundations in the UAB School of Education and Human Sciences (SEHS), where she helped to establish and formerly directed the UAB Center for Urban Education. She also holds secondary appointments in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences as a Professor in the African American Studies Program and the Department of History, and as a Senior Scientist with the UAB Institute for Human Rights (IHR). She is a 2025–2026 IHR Faculty Fellow for Human Rights and Society. She has worked on anti-poverty, anti-discrimination, and educational initiatives at nonprofit organizations, schools, and universities in Chicago, IL and Philadelphia, PA.

Dr. Loder-Jackson authored Schoolhouse Activists: African American Educators and the Long Birmingham Civil Rights Movement (2015, State University of New York Press). Her co-edited volume (with Derrick P. Alridge and Jon N. Hale), Schooling the Movement: The Activism of Southern Black Educators from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Era (2023, University of South Carolina Press), won a 2024 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award.

She was named one of Birmingham-Southern College’s 2020 Distinguished Alumni. Dr. Loder-Jackson established and funded the initial endowment for the Dr. Tondra L. Loder-Jackson Champion for Education Endowed Award for undergraduate student scholarships in the UAB SEHS.