ABSTRACT
John Russell Rickford is one of the most influential linguists in the field of language and society. During his four-decades-long career, his work has shaped and continues to influence research in areas as diverse as Creole studies, sociolinguistics, stylistics, education, and language and politics, to name a few. He is a Black scholar of Caribbean descent who has mentored and nourished many scholars, critically including Black and Brown scholars, many of whom have gone on to greatly impact their fields. And he has stalwartly maintained that linguistic research has to be grounded in—and advance—social justice and, further, that linguists have an obligation to the communities that they study.
