Sonya Ramsey named co-winner of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Black Heritage Committee’s 2025 TD Elder Trailblazer Award

Sonya Ramsey, Ph.D., has been announced as the co-winner of the 2025 TD Elder Trailblazer Award, awarded by the Charlotte Mecklenburg Black Heritage Committee (CMBHC), in recognition of her book, “Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership” (University Press of Florida, 2022).

Ramsey will be honored at the Charlotte Museum of History on Nov. 15, alongside Glenn H. Burkins, founder and publisher of QCity Metro.

“This award demonstrates the extraordinary impact Sonya Ramsey has as a faculty member — her dedication and support shape the lives and futures of countless students and colleagues,” said Mary Jo McGowan, Ph.D., executive director of the Interdisciplinary Studies program. “Through her visionary leadership, she has not only advanced her program’s mission but inspired transformative collaboration across disciplines.”

Ramsey is a professor of history, women’s and gender studies, and interdisciplinary studies, director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and is the acting chair of the Department of History for fall 2025. Maxwell-Roddey, who retired as UNC Charlotte’s Frank Porter Graham professor emeritus in 1986, was the founding director of the Department of Africana Studies.

“It is an honor to receive such a prestigious award in recognition of my biography of Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey, the founding director of UNC Charlotte’s Black Studies Program (now Africana Studies Department), at UNC Charlotte,” said Ramsey.

“I want to thank the Charlotte Mecklenburg Black Heritage Committee for recognizing Maxwell-Roddey’s enduring historical legacy as an educational and cultural institution builder, as exemplified in her efforts as a public school desegregation leader, forerunner in the development of the field of Black Studies, innovative campus administrator who established experiential service-learning courses, internships, student orientation, and wellness support services for Black Studies students, and co-founder of Charlotte’s Afro-American Cultural Center, now the Harvey B. Gantt Center for the Arts + Culture,” she said. 

The CMBHC is a nonprofit organization that aims to preserve and present African American history and culture with honor in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. The TD Elder Trailblazer Award is named after founder and noted Charlotte Mecklenburg civic leader, Thereasea Delerine Clark Elder (TD).

Like TD, the 2025 Trailblazer Award recipients are community members whose spirit, life, and work have blazed trails and charted new territory. Each year, the CMBHC designates a particular segment of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg community to spotlight, and this year’s ceremony celebrates writers and historians with the theme “Preserving and Documenting Charlotte’s African American History and Legacy.”

Ramsey is also the author of “Reading, Writing, and Segregation: a Century of Black Women Teachers in Nashville” (University of Illinois Press, 2008), and has contributed to Axios, Charlotte Magazine, The Daily Show, NPR and USA Today. She has previously received the 2023 C. Calvin Smith-Wali R. Kharif Book Award from the Southern Conference on African American Studies, Inc. (SCAASI) and a 2024 Award of Excellence from the North Carolina Society of Historians for her biography on Maxwell-Roddey.

She received a B.A. in Journalism from Howard University and M.A. and Ph.D. in United States History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In 2024, Ramsey spearheaded the Women’s and Gender Studies 40th Anniversary Oral History Collection project with the J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections and University Archives. 

The collection documents the origins, development, and legacy of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at UNC Charlotte through oral history interviews with former directors, faculty members, and students. In Ramsey’s interview, she discusses her overarching vision for establishing the collection to preserve forty years of program history at UNC Charlotte. In 2025, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program will expand the Library Project to focus on women leaders at UNC Charlotte and the Charlotte region from the 1960s to the present.