John Brown Childs is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was born on December 2, 1942, in a public housing project, in the Roxbury section of Boston.
In 1963, he co-organized a group of students from the University of Massachusetts to go to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where MLK delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech. In 1965, he took part in the Civil Rights Movement in Montgomery, AL, as a member of “Friends of SNCC”. For the past 17 years, as a partner with the community organization Barrios Unidos, John Brown Childs has been doing volunteer teaching and speaking on peacemaking and “transcommunal cooperation” in Soledad Prison, where he works with the diverse “Cemanahuac One-World Cultural Group” of incarcerated men. He is the author of numerous works, including the book Transcommunality, from the Politics of Conversion to the Ethics of Respect. This book, rooted in the ancient philosophy of the indigenous Haudenosaunee Peacemaker, Deganawidah, discusses ways in which people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives can, with mutual respect, work together, and learn from one another, while holding on to their own cultural and personal foundations.
In 1997, John Brown Childs was awarded the Fulbright Foundation’s “Thomas Jefferson Chair of Distinguished Teaching” which he held in the Netherlands at the University of Utrecht. In 2019 he received the University of California Social Science Division’s Distinguished Emeriti Faculty award, and in 2022, he earned the University of California’s system-wide highest award for emeriti faculty, the Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award, which has been awarded to only 49 emeriti faculty throughout the UC system.
Of African-Madagascan and Native American descent, John is, through his mother’s side of the family, an enrolled member of the Massachuset Tribe of Indigenous People at Ponkapoag, or “Sweet Water Pond”, on whose ancestral land, now known as Boston, he was born.
