He is currently completing a book tentatively titled New Negroes in the New South: Race, Power, and Ideology in Georgia, 1890-1925. He is also preparing a biography of William Jefferson White, a Baptist minister, political activist and journalist, who founded Morehouse College in 1867. Donaldson serves on the Board of Trustees of Wesleyan University and held a 2005-2006 fellowship at the W.E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He holds a PhD in History from Emory University.