Meet Dr. Sims-Alvarado

Dr. Karcheik Sims-Alvarado has studied the history and culture of African Americans throughout the Black Atlantic World for nearly 20 years.

Whether in the classroom, museum or in the field, she has sought to document and teach the African-American odyssey through various mediums.

As the CEO of Preserve Black Atlanta, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) dedicated to identifying, recording, and preserving African-American history and culture, Dr. Sims-Alvarado has developed a model for utilizing historical and cultural assets as a catalyst for economic and community development. She has worked with some of Atlanta’s leading institutions: the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Atlanta History Center, Herndon Home Museum, Central Atlanta Progress, and Atlanta BeltLine Inc.

Dr. Sims-Alvarado received a B.A. in Mass Media Arts and an M.A. in African and African-American Studies from Clark Atlanta University and a Ph.D. in History from Georgia State University. She is currently pursuing a M.A. degree in Museum Studies from Harvard University. As well, she is a multi-recipient of the prestigious National Endowment for Humanities Summer Institute Fellowship with the Georgia Historical Society and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.

Dr. Sims-Alvarado served as the Founding Director of the John Lewis Fellowship with the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. She is a leading authority on Alonzo Herndon, Atlanta’s first black millionaire, as well as the Nineteenth-Century Back-to-Africa Movement in Georgia.

She has served as the civil rights historian and exhibition consultant of “A Right to Freedom: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr” with the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, Sweden and is a creator and co-writer of “Lifting the Veiling,” based upon W.E.B. Du Bois’s first tenured at Atlanta University.

Dr. Sims-Alvarado is the author of Atlanta and the Civil Rights Movement, 1944-1968 and the curator of the world’s longest outdoor photography exhibition documenting the long civil rights movement. Currently, she is the Historical Advisor for the immersive exhibition, The March, presented by TIME magazine, and serves as Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.