BINFORD CONLEY(1933-2011)

Historian & Archivist

The Conley Family’s first nationally recognized academic and intellectual was Binford Harrison Conley, PhD. He began his academic career with a high profile assignment at Atlanta University, established in the West End neighborhood of Atlanta by his great-great uncle, Reconstruction Governor Benjamin Conley in a land deal with John D. Rockefeller. Binford restored, organized, and cataloged the academic papers and artifacts of John Hope, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, W.E.B. DuBois, Horace Mann Bond, Whitney Young, Benjamin Mays, Sam Nabrit, and Henry McBey. An archivist without peer of the Black intellectuals of the ‘Atlanta School’ of Sociology, his work became the foundation of the Woodruff Library, a stone’s throw from Gov. Benjamin Conley final home before his death in 1886.

Born in Huntsville, Alabama to Reverend Benjamin Conley, Binford attended Councill Training High School, then one of the finest schools for Colored Children in the segregated South of the 1940s. Conley attended Morehouse College during his undergraduate education, then Atlanta University for graduate study, before earning his PhD in Philosophy from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

From 1960 until 1963, Conley served as Head Librarian at South Carolina State University, expanding the the once meager collection to over 200,000. He was an early voice in memorializing E.E. Just, Benjamin Mays, and others who were graduates of South Carolina State’s defunct high school department. He was instrumental in raising money for the Miller F. Whittaker Library, which opened after his departure. The archives Dr. Conley organized made it possible to understand the importance of that school preparing intellectuals Earnest Everett Just (Class of 1893) and Benjamin E. Mays (Class of 1916), for their eventual success at the highest levels of academia.

In 1975, Conley later became Director of the Howard University Libraries and the Moorland–Spingarn Research Center. His revamp of the Moorland-Springarn Center made its debut during the 1976 Bicentennial Celebrations in Washington DC, as the world's largest and most comprehensive repositories for the documentation of the history and culture of people of African descent in America. Under Dr. Conley’s leadership from 1975 until 1983, the Moorland-Spingarn expanded to a full research center with more than 15,000 feet of manuscript and archival collections and nearly 250,000 bound books, journals, periodicals, and newspapers.

ChARLES CAMERON CONLEY(1933-1984)

MATHEMATICIAN

A renowned mathematician known for “The Conley Index Theory” and “The Conley–Zehnder Theorem” in modern math. Just before his death, his 1983 analysis of "The Birkhoff–Lewis fixed point theorem” described a lower bound for the number of fixed points of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of standard symplectic tori in terms of the topology of the underlying tori.

Conley was born in Michigan. After four and a half years in the Air Force graduated from Wayne State, where he earned a B.S. degree in 1957, and an M.S. degree in 1958. An exceptional intellect, he was accepted at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Boston, where he earned his Ph.D. at in 1962. After a postdoc at New York University's Courant Institute, he began his career as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was promoted to full professor in 1968.

His Conley-Zehnder theorem, is still widely cited as a specific case of the Arnold conjecture, and also the determination of stability type for periodic orbits in of low dimensional Hamiltonian systems.

DALTON CONLEY(Present)

SOCIOLOGIST

Dalton Conley is a sociologist of considerable fame. He is a University Professor in Sociology at Princeton, the highest designation possible for an endowed chair tenured professor at Princeton University. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Office of Population Research and the Center for Health and Wellbeing.

Conley’s scholarship has primarily dealt with the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic and health status from parents to children. His published work has explored the impact of parental wealth in explaining racial attainment gaps, within-family stratification processes impact on achievement, and genetics as a driver of social mobility.

He earned a B.A., M.P.A. in Public Policy, and Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Biology from NYU in 2014. His books include Being Black, Living in the Red; The Starting Gate; Honky; The Pecking Order; You May Ask Yourself; Elsewhere, USA;Parentology; and The Genome Factor. He has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Russell Sage Foundation fellowships as well as a CAREER Award and the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

HOUSTON CONLEY(1935-2023)

EDUCATION ADMINISTRATION

Houston Conley was an educator of historical significance. His groundbreaking work studying the integration of secondary schools added to the body of knowledge in education theory. His work explored how multicultural classrooms benefit students in life, long after schools years have been completed.

Conley was born in Alabama. He attended family alma mater Alabama A&M for his undergraduate work. The predecessor school for Alabama A&M, The Lincoln School, was underwritten by Houston collateral ancestor Paschal Conley the 1st, for whom Houston’s father and grandfather, Paschal ‘Pony’ Conley were named. Houston matriculated University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he earned an M.A. degree and a doctorate in Education.

His career began in Chattanooga Public Schools in Tennessee, where he was a principal and school board member. He quickly moved into administration as Supervisor of Curriculum and Instruction, Chattanooga Public Schools. After a special assignment at the University of Tehran, in a jointly run program with Vanderbilt University, Peabody College of Education in Nashville.

Upon his return from overseas in the 1970s, he revisited his time as a practitioner, as Deputy Superintendent, in Dayton, Ohio and Washington D.C.

The apex of his career came as he was named full Professor of Education at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. In addition to his role as Professor, Houston was a consultant to the Virginia State Department of Education, as well as consultancies Harold Webb Associates and BWP Associates, both specializing in secondary education.

KATHERINE CONLEY (PRESENT)

LITERATURE& LINGUISTICS

Katherine Conley is an Associate Professor of English. University of Central Arkansas.

Her areas of specialization include Medieval and Renaissance literature and poetry. She has published academic papers on Chaucer and also the impact of T. H. White and his Arthurian fantasy novels about the legend of King Arthur. A polyglot she has proficiency in spoken French and written Latin, German, Old English, Middle English, Old Irish, Old French, and Old Occitan.

Conley was born in Pennsylvania. She graduated from Louisiana State, where she earned a B.A. degree in English, French and German Language and Literature. She later earned M.A. and Ph.D. in English Language and Literature. from Louisiana State University.

Still early in her career, Katherine has given talks and presentations on Romanos the Melodist, an early medieval Greek poet and saint, at academic conferences on Medieval and Renaissance periods. She is a member of the Medieval Academy of America, International Society for the History of Rhetoric, the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the Southeastern Medieval Association.

TOVI SCRUGGS (PRESENT)

EDUCATION ADMINISTRATION

Tovi Scruggs is a visionary educator, author, and award-winning urban high school principal. Tovi serves as California’s Regional Executive Director of Partners in School Innovation, a non-profit focused on improving educational outcomes in the lowest-performing schools in our nation. Further, Tovi is ACSA’s State Equity Region 6 Representative and founding teacher of both ACSA’s Equity Academy. Previously, she founded the ASA Academy, a private school, and began her career as Principal of San Lorenzo high school.

The daughter of Gordon Scruggs, Tovi was born in California. Scruggs earned her two bachelor's degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, and M.A. in Education from Mills College.

As an education consultant, her clients include Unified School Districts across California: Berkeley, Brentwood, Castro Valley, Pleasanton, San Diego, Vacaville, Sonoma, and Tracy.

MELINDA WILSON RAMEY(present)

THEATER HISTORIAN

Melinda Wilson Ramey is Professor, Sacramento State, Department of Theatre and Dance at Sacramento State University in California. At Sacramento State, she led department faculty through curriculum revision process for the Theatre Department’s degree-granting criteria, and re-established department accreditation with National Association of Schools of Theatre (NAST).

Raised in Tennessee, she attended Vanderbilt University, earning a B.A. in Theatre Arts. She attended Northwestern University, for graduate school, securing M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Theatre and Drama.

She is a published expert in the history of Black Theatre Arts. Her academic writing has been published in: The Journal of American Drama and Theatre; The Journal of African Diaspora Drama; Theatre and Performance; and The Theatre Journal.

As a Director, she has produced more than two dozens stage performances of such classic works as: Blues for an Alabama Sky and Bourbon at the Border by Pearl Cleage, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by August Wilson, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years by Sarah L. and A. Elizabeth Delany, A Soldier’s Play by Charles Fuller, and Les Blancs by Lorraine Hansberry.