Sydney Harold Nathans (born May 24, 1940) is an American historian who is a professor emeritus at Duke University and has written several history books including To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker and A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland.
[4] In 1978, Nathans travelled across Alabama to see if he could locate descendants of enslaved African Americans in order to gain a better understanding of the Great Migration.
[2] There, he encountered Alice Hargress, whose story he based his book on titled A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland.
[8] A few years later, he continued his research into the history of black migration in America by following the story of Mary Walker in Glastonbury, Connecticut.
[9][10] It would go on to receive the 2013 Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History as "the best book written in English on slavery or abolition.