University Libraries Promotion and Tenure Recognition

I read The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 during my first semester of college. In the book, author James D. Anderson provides an in-depth history of black education from the Civil War to the Great Depression focusing on a variety of topics including African Americans’ enthusiasm for education; the links between education and freedom; and national debates about the purposes of black education. The Education of Blacks in the South inspired me to write an undergraduate honors thesis on black elementary and secondary educational institutions in the South prior to school desegregation. I then went on to graduate school where the book became a foundational text in my own work as a scholar of African American history who explores African Americans’ everyday acts of resistance and resiliency in the twentieth century. Building on Anderson’s work, my scholarship aims to demonstrate the centrality of education to the African American freedom struggle.