James Banks: Preeminent Scholar of Multicultural Civic Education

For over a half century, James Banks has been central to the creation of accessible theories and practices that have accrued him international recognition as the preeminent scholar of multicultural civic education, often referred to as “the father of multicultural education.” Banks grew up in the racially segregated South of the United States on a cotton farm in the Arkansas Delta and learned as Black child to navigate the racism of Jim Crow practices. Banks’s entire career must be contextualized within historical struggles for full citizenship rights under ever-present threats of vigilantism and sanctioned police violence. During the 1960s, James Banks moved to Chicago, completed an undergraduate degree, and went on to teach elementary school in Illinois. After completing his Ph.D. at Michigan State University in 1969, Banks became the first African American hired in the College of Education at the University of Washington in Seattle where he worked for 50 years until his retirement in 2019. James Banks is past-president of both the National Council of Social Studies and the American Educational Research Association. Among his hundreds of publications, Banks’s major scholarship includes the Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education; Teaching Strategies for Ethnic Studies; Cultural Diversity and Education: Foundations, Curriculum, and Teaching; the four-volume Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education; and initiating and editing 80 books for the Multicultural Education Series for Columbia University’s Teachers College Press. For those who worked in any capacity with James Banks, he is also known for his generosity and inclusiveness.