Professor Butch Ware is a lifelong activist and educator specializing in the history of empire, colonialism, genocide and revolution. For the past two decades, Ware has put scholarship in service of the people, especially in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as the George Floyd murder in 2020. He has organized teach-ins, community education curricula, and other activist and organizing initiatives. More broadly, Ware has been working as a public intellectual, activist, artist, and organizer, supporting communities across the country and around the world to challenge imperialism, ethnic cleansing, and endless war, and to build sustainable, just, peaceful alternatives rooted in African, Indigenous, and Abrahamic traditions.
Butch was born in Washington DC and raised in Minneapolis. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1997, and completed his doctorate in 2004. With his Ph.D in history from the University of Pennsylvania, Ware is a leading academic authority on the U.S. Black Radical Tradition, Africa and Islam. Since 2004 Professor Ware has been a full faculty member at Northwestern, Michigan, and now UC Santa-Barbara, teaching in History, Black Studies, and Islamic Studies.