Wilson Jeremiah Moses (1942-2024) received his doctorate in American Civilization from Brown University. One of the most distinguished scholars of African American Studies of his generation, he was a professor of history at Penn State for twenty-two years. He published nearly a dozen books, exhibiting a tremendous range in the history of ideas. 

Not only did he write on Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells, Ralph Ellison, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X, he also wrote on Thomas Jefferson, Enlightenment philosophy, economics, comparative ethnic studies, and American Christianity. It could be argued that a common thread of all his interests was the social and historical manipulation of literary and religious myths. 

Born and raised in Detroit from the 1940s to 1950s, he came to maturity in the transition from the CIO labor to the modern Black freedom movements. His parents passed on to him HBCU and Catholic traditions of education. He studied literature at Wayne State University. Besides Penn State, he also taught at Brown and Boston Universities, SMU, the University of Iowa, and lectured and researched in Britain, Germany, France, and Africa.