Teaching
I teach a variety of courses that focus on the African American experience in the United States. In each of my classes, I encourage my students to approach the material with the spirit of critical inquiry and investigation. I have high expectations when it comes to class participation and involvement. Students are not simply receptacles for information; they are encouraged—required, actually—to become vocal and engaged members of the academic community we’re trying to create together. When their thoughts, opinions and questions are not heard, the entire community loses the benefit of their wisdom. Additionally, I challenge my students to place the content of their courses within larger historical contexts, and to see the vitality and nuance that can be found on both sides of the hyphen in African-American. Typically, we’ll cover a particular period using primary documents, literature, web resources, music, movies and anything else I can find that will give my students a sense of how life was lived by those in the past.
Most of my courses contribute to the Africana Studies Program at Rhodes. Learn more about the Africana Studies program.
Research
My primary research interests include the Civil Rights Movement, and the exploration of local movements in particular. I’m fascinated by the various means individuals and organizations utilized in their efforts to create change. Beginning in my undergraduate days at Morehouse College and continuing through my graduate school tenure at Duke, I’ve worked to illuminate the under-researched phenomenon of mass-based protest and community struggle that takes place far removed from the urban centers of the South. My first book, Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina (University Press of America, 2010), explored the slow, deliberate building of a movement in a rural community in the eastern-central portion of the state. It’s one thing to march, organize and boycott under the glare of city lights and press cameras. It’s quite another thing to march, organize and boycott in areas that major networks have never heard of and will likely never seek to find.
My second book, co-edited with Aram Goudsouzian, is titled An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee (University Press of Kentucky). An Unseen Light presents a multidisciplinary examination of African American activism in Memphis from the dawn of emancipation to the twenty-first century. The book investigates episodes such as the 1940 "Reign of Terror" when Black Memphians experienced a prolonged campaign of harassment, mass arrests, and violence at the hands of police. It also examines topics including the relationship between the labor and civil rights movements, the fight for economic advancement in black communities, and the impact of music on the city's culture. Covering subjects as diverse as politics, sports, music, activism, and religion, An Unseen Light illuminates Memphis's place in the long history of the struggle for African American freedom and human dignity.
My third book, From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle (Vanderbilt University Press), was co-edited with my colleague Francoise Hamlin and published in 2024. Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grassroots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissension—core aspects of movement work—mark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multilevel responses to these assertions of Black humanity. From Rights to Lives critically engages the dynamic relationship between these two moments of liberatory possibility on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. The book’s contributors explore what we can learn when we place these moments of struggle in dialogue with each other.
My next project, tentatively titled The Political Worlds of George Washington Lee: Race, Power, and Politics in Memphis, Tennessee, explores the life and career of George Washington Lee, an African American Republican operative and civil rights activist who lived in Memphis in the middle of the twentieth century. Lee was a staunch supporter of civil rights, and utilized his expansive networks in the African American Civic Universe of Memphis to both build a civil rights movement in the city and combat the rightward drift of the GOP.
Selected Publications
Books
From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle, Co-edited with Françoise Hamlin (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2024)
An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee, Co-edited with Aram Goudsouzian (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018)
Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010)
Articles and Book Chapters
“Potentializing Violence”, in Leigh Raiford, Ariella, Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Laura Wexler, Collaboration: A Potential History Of Photography (London: Thames and Hudson, 2023), 107
“Complicating Martin Luther King, Jr.: Teaching the Life and Legacy of the Movement’s Most Iconic Figure”, in Hasan Jeffries, ed., Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), 113-130
“Riot”, in Erica Edwards, Roderick Ferguson, Jeffrey Ogbar, eds., Keywords in African American Studies (New York University Press, 2018) 179-183.
“Beyond Dreams and Mountains: Martin King’s Challenge to the Arc of History,” The University of Memphis Law Review (Vol. 49, no. 1, Fall, 2018), 263 – 284
Conference Presentations
“The Language of Liberation: George Washington Lee and the construction of a civil rights narrative in Memphis, Tennessee,” College Language Association Conference, Memphis, TN, April 2024
“Dr. King and Economic Justice”, Project Humanities Lecture, Arizona State University, January 2024
“To Study A State To Know A Nation: North Carolina and the United States”, Final Plenary Session, Southern Historical Association, Charlotte, NC, November 2023
“The Political Worlds of George Washington Lee”, Nashville Conference on African American History and Culture, February 2023
George Lee and the Politics of Black Representation”, Association for the Study of African American Life and History Conference, September 2022
Selected Interviews About My Research
Interview, “Critical Race Theory”, Imagine An America: The National Civil Rights Museum Podcast, June 2024.
Interview, The Black Studies Podcast, May 2024.
Interview for From Rights To Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle, New Books In African American Studies Podcast, March 2024.
Conversations in Atlantic Theory, Podcast that explores the Cultural, Political and Philosophical conditions of the Atlantic World: Discussion of An Unseen Light with Aram Goudsouzian, February 2022.
Random Thoughts
- I was born in Missouri, raised in California and educated in the South. This makes me something of a geographical vagabond. I only mention this because I am continually fascinated by the impact of geographical differences on our daily interactions.
- When I moved to Memphis, the varied musical community I found pleasantly surprised me. As a jazz saxophonist, I was prepared to enter some seriously fallow territory. After all, isn’t Memphis only known as the home of the Blues and Elvis? Aren’t they supposed to have a monopoly on the music landscape here? Well, no. Fortunately for me, I was dead wrong. The jazz scene here is wonderful! Punk, Rock, Celtic, Gospel – you name it, you can find it here.
- The greatest basketball player of all time is Earvin “Magic” Johnson.
