August 23, 2001

BIRMINGHAM, AL — Professor Raymond A. Mohl, Ph.D., chairman of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of History, has been named the winner of the Frederick W. Conner Prize in the History of Ideas for 2001. He will receive the award during a special ceremony 3:30 p.m. Friday, September 14, in the Mervyn H. Sterne Library, Henley Room, 917 13th Street South.

The Conner Prize is presented annually to a UAB faculty member for an outstanding essay on the history of ideas. The prize, which carries a $250 award, is named for Frederick Conner, Ph.D., former dean of the School of Arts and Humanities.

Mohl is the author of the winning essay “Whitening Miami: Race, Housing and Government Policy in Twentieth Century Dade County.” In his essay, Mohl examines the role government agencies played in creating racially separate and segregated housing in Dade County, Florida. In particular, Mohl discusses how government agencies used zoning, public housing and urban renewal policies to segregate African-Americans. Similarly, interstate highway construction purposefully destroyed inner-city black housing, opening up valuable land for redevelopment and forcing mass relocations to peripheral areas of the city. What happened in Miami, Mohl said, was not at all unusual in post-war urban America.

Mohl earned his doctorate from New York University in 1967. He joined the UAB faculty in 1996. He is the author or editor of 10 books and numerous articles, mostly on U.S. urban history and race relations. His most recent work is The New African-American Urban History (1996). He is writing two books: a study of the social impact of interstate highways on American cities and a history of race relations in Miami.

Mohl is a member of Phi Kappa Phi. He was president of the Urban History Association from 1997 to 1998. He has held Fulbright professorships at Tel Aviv University, the University of Western Australia and the University of Gottingen, as well as major research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Poverty and Race Research Action Council.