20th century United States History; African American History; Gender and Sexuality; Social and Cultural History; Urban History
HIS 162: U.S. History II
HIS 379: African American History
HIS 306: The City in American History
HIS 306: Civil Rights in America
HIS 419: Race and the American City
HIS 459: American Utopias
HIS 503: American History Core II
HIS 550: The Long Civil Rights Movement
My current research examines the emergence of experimental interracial communities in mid-twentieth century America. These “interracial utopias” ranged from transient radical pacifist communities in cities like Chicago and Washington, D.C., to rural communes that combined Christian pacifism with a commitment to racial equality. I am also researching the life of an African American pacifist and civil rights activist, Eroseanna Robinson.
Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)
Remaking Respectability: African-American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)
“Radical Nonviolence, Interracial Utopias and the Congress of Racial Equality in the early Civil Rights Movement,” inThe Journal of Civil and Human Rights, 4, 2 (Fall/Winter 2018): 31-61
“Recreation and Race in the Postwar City: Buffalo’s 1956 Crystal Beach Riot,” Journal of American History (June 2006): 63-90.
“The Culture of the Informal Economy: Numbers Runners in Inter-War Black Detroit,” The Radical History Review (Fall 1997): 46-75.
“‘Bible, Bath, and Broom’: Nannie Helen Burroughs, the National Training School, and the Uplift of the Race,” Journal of Women’s History (Spring 1997): 88-110.