Bob Graham Center for Public Service

Kevin Bird, Ph.D., serves as the Center's Experiential Learning Coordinator and Lecturer. He selects and works with students in the local CiviGators internship, the Tallahassee Internship, and the Washington Internship programs. Dr. Bird has also guided students’ experiential learning as a part of his advising and student support in UF's Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, and the Warrington Professional MBA programs. He has taught for multiple departments at Santa Fe College and UF. He appreciates getting the most out of our study of history and from students’ career preparedness. Prior to higher education, he served as a pastor for a decade, and continues to enjoy engaging in ecclesial contexts.

Dr. Bird has a doctorate in history from UF with a focus on the American South. He also holds a master's and bachelor’s in history from the University of Southern Mississippi, and another master’s degree from Abilene Christian University's Graduate School of Theology.

His teaching and research interests include the lives and work of farmers and industrial workers who build consequential, broad-based social movements. He demonstrates the relevance of sharecroppers’ and railroad workers’ struggles to uphold the value and dignity of their labor to the origins of grassroots organizing approaches that prioritized enfranchising entire communities.

In particular, he tracks community-based struggles from Reconstruction to the late 20th century to “establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty,” as set forth in the U.S. Constitution. African Americans led the pursuit for these ideals beginning in the 1860s in the deep southern contexts in which Dr. Bird grew up, southwest Mississippi and southeast Louisiana. What Dr. Bird has termed as the McComb Organizing Model (MCOM) became the dominant methodology used by African Americans and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers in what developed into the largest expansion of democracy in the history of the United States.