Rate My Professor Matthew Nichter

Matthew Nichter is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Sociology Department at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. He earned a B.A. from Brown University and both an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His doctoral dissertation, completed in 2014, is titled "Rethinking the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Radicals, Repression, and the Black Freedom Struggle." Nichter joined Rollins College as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology around 2012 and advanced to his current position as Associate Professor. He also serves as coordinator of the African and African American Studies program.

Nichter's research specializations focus on social movements, particularly the African American civil rights movement and its intersections with labor unions and the socialist movement. He frequently teaches courses on civil rights and the Black Lives Matter movement. His key publications include the article "Did Emmett Till Die in Vain? Organized Labor Says No!": The United Packinghouse Workers and Civil Rights Unionism in the Mid-1950s, published in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History in 2021. This work explores the United Packinghouse Workers of America's response to Emmett Till's murder, featuring interracial activism, mass meetings addressed by Till's mother, and union observers at the trial in Mississippi. The publication earned Nichter the John Russo & Sherry Linkon Award for Published Article or Essay from the Working Class Studies Association. In 2023, he published "From the Ashes of the Old: The Old Left and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1957-1965" in Critical Historical Studies. This article examines the socialist Old Left's influence on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference through personnel overlaps, such as Rev. Joseph Lowery and C.T. Vivian, network ties, organizational alliances, and support from leftist labor unions. Nichter's scholarship highlights radical influences on civil rights organizations and labor's contributions to racial justice, bridging civil rights unionism of the 1930s-1940s with the 1950s-1960s movement.