Linda Williams, 57, Expert on Race and Gender at U-Md.

Mr. Williams wanted his daughter to go to Prairie View A&M University, the historically black school nearby, but she insisted on attending Rice University in Houston. In 1970, she and another student became the first African Americans to obtain undergraduate degrees from what had been an officially segregated institution until 1964.

Chandler Davidson, a retired Rice sociology professor, recalled a 1969 class he taught on political sociology, where "Linda sat in the back and was quiet as a little church mouse." Midway through the semester, she told Davidson she wanted to write her term paper about U.S. Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a Texas Democrat who supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Davidson urged her to assess Yarborough's support among white East Texans, who were often segregationists but also supported economic populists such as Yarborough.

"She turned in a 50-page paper," Davidson recalled. "I still have a copy of it; it's a wonderful paper -- well argued, well researched. I was just bowled over by her performance."

Davidson encouraged her to pursue a career in political science. She won a prestigious Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and received a master's degree in 1973 and doctorate in 1977, both in political science and from the University of Chicago.

Years later, she was still pondering some of the same issues she first explored in Davidson's class. "I think the civil rights era represented a moment of optimism that was very different from the entire rest of American history," she told the Baltimore Sun in 2002. "It was almost a moment of madness, when all was possible. Momentarily, people believed that now we could overcome the centrality of race in American politics."

She joined the Howard University faculty in 1977.

Ten years later, she quit her tenured position to become associate director of research at the Joint Center for Political Studies. From 1989 to 1991, she was a research fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

She became an associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland in 1991, taking a leave of absence from 1993 to 1995 to serve as director of the Institute for Policy Research and Education at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. She became a full professor in 2004.

She took pride in serving as a mentor to African American students and was honored with a special mentoring award at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Some of her former graduate students, many now on university faculties, call themselves "Linda's academic children."

Survivors include her husband of 19 years, of Rockville; her father, Washington Columbus Williams, and her stepmother, Mittie Williams, both of Lovelady; a brother, Washington Columbus Williams Jr. of Owings Mills; two sisters, Susan Patterson of Charlotte, and Zandra Williams of New York; three stepchildren, R. Christopher Gomes of Monrovia, Liberia, Robert Alexander Gomes of Toronto and Jerusha Ann Gomes of Oxon Hill; and six grandchildren.