I'm a historian specializing in Black Studies, Southern History, and Gender History. My current book project, The Price of Freedom: Race, Consumption, and the Long Black Freedom Struggle, 1915-1970, places Black shoppers at the center of histories of consumption, racial formation, and the Civil Rights Movement. The Price of Freedom tracks the rapid expansion of chain stores in the wake of WWI. I explore how chains’ efforts to standardize their shopping procedures inadvertently reduced racial prejudice against Black customers. Chains welcomed Black Americans as shoppers, while engaging in employment discrimination against them as workers, a highly extractive arrangement. Through my engagement with the history of chains, I demonstrate that the facially neutral forms of racism primarily associated with the post-civil rights era have roots in the early twentieth century South.
In addition, the Price of Freedom argues that Black consumer experiences and activism, such as boycotts, sit-ins, and pickets, lay at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. Amid the Cold War, the United States held out mass consumption as a proof of the benefits of citizenship in a capitalist and democratic nation. The discrimination Black shoppers encountered in stores was a potent symbol of their exclusion from America’s “consumers’ republic,” and status as second-class citizens. I track how Black southerners fought to shop as equals, as a prerequisite to living as equals from the early to mid-twentieth century. “The Price of Freedom” was a semi-finalist for the Krooss Dissertation Prize and was shortlisted for the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize. My project garnered support from the John F. Enders Fellowship, John Morton Blum Fellowship, and Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. Before joining the faculty of UO, I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia.
At the University of Oregon, I teach courses on African American history, the Civil Rights Movement, and consumerism. I focus on helping students learn to identify and construct arguments using primary and secondary sources, in order to develop their own perspective and voice as scholars and thinkers.
