Dr. Charles D. Johnson, Executive Director 

Email: ed@sdchq.org

Dr. Charles Denton Johnson is an Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). As a proud alumnus of NCCU’s History graduate program, he returned to the university in 2015 to serve as the Director of Public History. Dr. Johnson is an award-winning teacher and a co-author of two books: (1) Topics on African Diaspora History (2016) and (2) NC A&T vs. NCCU: More Than Just a Game (2023), a recent publication that chronicles the 100-year history of the Aggie vs. Eagle football rivalry in photos and newspaper articles. He holds degrees from Morehouse College, B.A.; North Carolina Central, M.A.; and Howard University, Ph.D. Dr. Johnson is a scholar of African Diaspora, African American, and Public History. Dr. Johnson is a recognized leader in the field of Public History inside and outside of the academy. In 2023, he was the lead historian and co-curator of America’s Voices Against Apartheid, a museum exhibition on the historical role African Americans played in the struggle for South African liberation, which was installed in the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa in May and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC in September. Dr. Johnson is the current Principal Investigator (PI) for the ACLS-funded Digital Extension grant, Expanding the Digital Library on American History Through Local Community-Engaged Digital Humanities Research, which helps to preserve the history of Bragtown, one of Durham’s earliest African American communities. 

He is currently participating in the 2024-2026 Responsible Artificial Intelligence (RAI) cohort with the prestigious National Humanities Center (NHC). In fact, he was awarded a NHC grant to develop a co-constructed, team-taught, interdisciplinary course, ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the African Diaspora,” across two HBCU campuses that brings computer science and the humanities, with specific reference to the African Diaspora, into a conversation about how to create more inclusive AI tools and culturally sensitive AI practitioners. Dr. Johnson is the proud father of Xavier Johnson, a freshman in the Honors College at North Carolina A&T State University studying Civil Engineering.