Research

A specialist in twentieth century United States history, I am currently at work on a book, “Troublemakers: Black and Chicano Activists and the Students’ Rights Revolution,” which is forthcoming with New York University Press in 2019. This project has been funded by grants and fellowships from the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Society for Legal History, and the University of Oklahoma.

This book project examines how local struggles against racial discrimination at school led to many of the lawsuits that led the courts to establish the constitutional rights of students in public elementary and secondary schools. Before the mid-1960s, students in public schools were considered to have virtually no constitutional rights—including rights to free speech, privacy, or due process of law. The book charts the development of students’ constitutional rights from local protests that generated lawsuits to key decisions issued by the United States Supreme Court, tracing how the courts acknowledged the rights of students while also limited the kinds of claims students could make to substantially equal education.

I am also at work on a new research project that follows a Mississippi family that crossed the color line after the Civil War. The Burnsides of Neshoba County briefly came to attention in the national black press when a dispute over the estate of the last living son generated a series of court challenges that tested the family’s claim to whiteness. Neshoba County is better known as the place where three civil rights workers were abducted and murdered in June 1964. But a decade earlier, the county’s residents were riveted by the Burnside case, which encompassed competing claims to the family’s fortune from both white and black Burnsides and revealed the enduring contradictions of the state’s color line.