W. Darrell Walden, Ph.D. CPA

Dr. Darrell Walden is an amatuer historian and associate professor of accounting in the Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond (UR). He is a widely published scholar, with expertise in cost and managerial accounting, environmental accounting, accounting information systems, E-commerce, and accounting education.

Dr. Walden earned his Ph.D. in Business with honors from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) where he majored in Accounting, and minored in Finance and Information Systems. Dr. Walden was among only 24 Blacks out of 1206 Ph.D.s in Business earned in 1994 (Blacks earned only 2% of these degrees in the 1990s). Prior to his tenure at UR, he taught at three other universities including VCU and the prestigious Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University—Provo UT.

Prior to his academic career, he became early in his career a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) licensed in Virginia and still consults with a number of firms in the central Virginia area today. His professional career experience has included work in the Controllers’ staff and corporate tax departments of two Fortune 500 companies.

Dr. Walden is also co-founder of the Virginia Freedmen Project whose mission is to encourage and strengthen families, particularly those within the African American community, to discover their genealogy and family history.  The Freedmen Project Team has linked the history and records of the Freedmen’s Bureau and Freedman’s Bank to African American genealogical research, a product of which is the highly acclaimed presentation “Whispers from the Dust: The Freedmen Records and African American Family History.” The Freedmen Project Team is currently pursuing other research activities relating to the Freedmen records. Most recently helping to develop the “Virginia Freedmen Extraction and Indexing Project,” which now is spearheaded by the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia along with their partners the Genealogical Society of Utah and Howard University.