Born and raised in South Carolina, June Manning Thomas attended Furman University for one year but then left SC to finish college at Michigan State University (MSU). She earned her doctorate in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan. She has taught at MSU, Cleveland State University, and University of Michigan (UM), and was eventually named the Mary Frances Berry Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Urban Planning, at UM. Residents of Michigan, she and her husband Richard have two adult children and four grandchildren, and both have gained extraordinary insight and confirmation from their longtime affiliation with the Bahá’í Faith.

June’s books and articles have studied spirituality and planning, racial inequities in urban planning, planning history, and the civil rights movement. Titles include Planning Progress: Lessons from Shoghi Effendi; the co-edited Urban Planning and the African American Community; Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit; and the co-edited The City after Abandonment (2013). The latest is Struggling to Learn: An Intimate History of School Desegregation in South Carolina (Univ. of So. Carolina Press, 2022). A number of articles and book chapters supplement these books. You may also wish to visit her University of Michigan faculty page.