Detroit, Michigan, native Bernadette Pruitt is an associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. She teaches classes on race and ethnicity, internal migrations, slavery, long civil rights, Recent United States history, and the African Diaspora. A 2010 Distinguished Alumna of The Graduate School at Texas Southern University (BA, Journalism, 1989; and MA, History, 1991), she earned her PhD in History from The University of Houston in 2001. Pruitt is the author of one book, The Other Great Migration: The Movement of Rural African Americans to Houston, 1900-1941 (College Station: Texas A. & M. University Press, 2013); and she has written numerous scholarly articles, book chapters, reference essays, and book reviews about Black urban life, Black Texas, and the history of Houston. She is currently studying African American women historians in the Texas academy, as well as examining World War II Black Texas and the Second Great Migration. The scholar has won several awards including the Ottis Lock Book Award with the East Texas Historical Association; two postdoctoral fellowships with the University of Illinois at Chicago African American Studies Department, and Center for Africanameican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE) and Department of History at Carnegie-Mellon University; a dissertation fellowship from the Department of African American Studies at the University of Houston; and numerous other research and travel awards from the Texas State Historical Association, Dolph Briscoe Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and  the Huggins-Quarles Award committee with the Organization of American Historians. Pruitt currently serves as a board member for the East Texas Historical Association and Texas state Historical Association. Pruitt also co-advises two student organizations, Phi Alpha Theta National History Honor Society and Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority.