Online Forum–Contested Citizenship: Legacies of American Slavery
August 2, 2021 to August 10, 2021
Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), is collaborating with the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale University to host an online forum on the theme “Contested Citizenship.” Organized by Lisa A. Monroe, Project Manager of CIC “Legacies of American Slavery,” the online forum will grapple with Black people’s contested citizenship in the United States by exploring various topics, including policing in the Black community and Black citizenship and health care, housing and wealth-building. The online forum begins on Monday, August 2nd and concludes on Tuesday, August 10th. The roundtable will feature six essays from William A. Darity Jr. and Charles Ali Bey, Kerri Greenidge, Phillip McHarris, Louis Moore, Martha S. Jones, and Crystal Lynn Webster.
During the online forum, Black Perspectives will publish new blog posts every day at 6:00AM EST. Please follow Black Perspectives (@BlkPerspectives) and AAIHS (@AAIHS) on Twitter, like AAIHS on Facebook, or subscribe to our blog for updates. By subscribing to Black Perspectives, each new post will automatically be delivered to your inbox during the week of the roundtable.
About the Organizer
About the Participants
William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. He has served as chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and was the founding director of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap, North-South theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, the history of economics, and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment. His most recent book, coauthored with A. Kirsten Mullen, is From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (2020). The book has received the 2021 Lillian Smith Book Award, the 2021 Association for the Study of Negro Life and History Book Prize, and the 2020 Ragan Old North State Award for Nonfiction from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. He tweets from @SandyDarity.
Charles Ali Bey is a co-founder of the United Sons and Daughters of Freedmen and was a student of political science and anthropology during his college years. He also has a background in music production and studio engineering and has worked with such notables as the great Patti Labelle, Nile Rodgers & Chic, producer Teddy Riley, Tyrese, Latocha Scott of the r&b group Xscape, UK artists Stefflon Don and Craig David to name a few. Bey’s family was part of the “great migration” and hails from the southern states of Georgia and South Carolina. He considers himself a concerned citizen and an avid researcher. Bey contributes much to the historical research presented by Be The Power. Follow him on Twitter @MrAliBey.
Kerri Greenidge is the author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (2019). Listed by the New York Times as one of its top picks of 2019, the book is the first biography of Boston editor, William Monroe Trotter, written in nearly fifty years. Black Radical examines black radical politics and grassroots community protest in the north beyond the Washington-Du Bois dialectic. The book received the Mark Lynton Prize in History, the Massachusetts Book Award, and the Peter J. Gomes Book Prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society. Black Radical was also short-listed for the Stone Book Award from the Museum of African American History, Boston, the Cundill History Prize, and the Plutarch Award for Best biography. Greenidge received her doctorate in American Studies from Boston University. Her scholarship examines African American and African Diasporic politics outside of the post-bellum South, particularly through popular literature and the trans-national black press. Her writings have appeared in the Massachusetts Historical Review, the Radical History Review, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the Guardian. She is currently Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, where she also co-directs the African American Trail Project. She tweets from @GreenidgeKerri.
Phillip V. McHarris is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University in the Department of African American Studies and the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. He recently completed his PhD in Sociology and African American Studies at Yale University. McHarris’s main areas of research include race and ethnicity, housing, policing, and inequality. His current research focuses on the experiences of residents of a high-rise public housing development in Brooklyn, NY as they navigate concerns surrounding safety, policing, building conditions, and cycles of poverty. In another line of research, McHarris examines the causes and consequences of the large-scale expansion of policing in the United States since 1965 and the strategies that communities employ to challenge police expansion and end police violence. McHarris draws on qualitative and quantitative methods throughout his research. McHarris is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. He received his B.A. in Sociology from Boston College. In addition to his scholarly work, McHarris has written for outlets that include The New York Times, Washington Post, and Slate. His commentary has been featured on HBO, CNN, TIME, and PBS. In 2020, McHarris was selected as one of the Root 100 Most Influential African Americans. He tweets from @philipvmcharris.
Louis Moore is a Professor of History at Grand Valley State University. He is the author of two books, I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915 (2017) and We Will Win the Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest for Equality (2017). He has an audible lecture for Great Course, “African American Athletes Who Made History” on Amazon. He is currently working on a book about the Black quarterback. He is also the co-host of the Black Athlete Podcast. He has also written for a number of online outlets including The Shadow League, Vox, and Black Perspectives, and has appeared on news outlets including NPR, MSNBC, and BBC Sports talking sports and race. You can follow him on Twitter @loumoore12.
Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy. Jones is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), selected as one of Time’s 100 must-read books for 2020. Her 2018 book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), was winner of the Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Award (best book in civil rights history), the American Historical Association Littleton-Griswold Prize (best book in American legal history), the American Society for Legal History John Phillip Reid book award (best book in Anglo-American legal history) and the Baltimore City Historical Society Scholars honor for 2020. Jones is also the author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (2007) and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press (2015), together with many articles and essay. She tweets from @marthasjones_.
Crystal Webster is a historian of race, gender, and childhood in early America. She is Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. Webster received her PhD from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research has received recognition from the National Council for Black Studies, Association for Black Women Historians and funding from the American Antiquarian Society, Massachusetts Historical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Webster’s first book, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North, is newly published with UNC Press. In addition to the Black Perspectives Blog, her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, NY Times, and USA Today. She tweets from @Crystallynnweb.