Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2009, Educational Leadership

Many Americans in the nineteenth century argued for limited education for blacks –or no education at all for African Americans in the south. As a result, black churches took up the role and pushed for education as a means to liberate African Americans. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church stands as a good exemplar for a black denomination that explicitly expressed in their policies that they understood the connection of education to African American liberation. This study is a historical analysis of the AME Church's advocacy of African American empowerment through education from 1816 to 1893. In the AME Church's nineteenth century doctrinal statements and publications the leaders explicitly stated that education was a necessary component for black liberation. In this dissertation I argue that, although there were other organizations that pushed for African American education in the nineteenth century, the African Methodist Episcopal Church stood at the fore in advocating for education and connecting it to African American liberation. My primary question is: How did the AME Church connect their advocacy for black education to liberation for African Americans in the nineteenth century? The dissertation will explore two aspects of liberation in the nineteenth century. During the first half of the nineteenth century–from the AME Church's founding in 1816 through the end of the Civil war in 1865 –the Church worked toward a liberation that was focused on the abolition of slavery and overcoming racial oppression. In the latter half of the nineteenth century from 1865 to 1893 –with the death of Bishop Payne– the AME Church focused on a liberation that was geared toward the notions of uplift and self-agency within the black community, namely black social, economic, and political advancement. The last chapter will examine how this historical analysis has implications for transforming African American education in present times. The text will examine the black chu (open full item for complete abstract)

MFA, Kent State University, 2023, College of the Arts / School of Art

The transactional interplay between “Blackness” and “whiteness” is a dysfunctional melody that sets the tone for America's inner workings. This is particularly true for those who fit the description of a Magical Body. A Magical Body as defined by sociologist; Tressie Mcmillian Cottom are "bodies that society does not mind holding up to take the shots for other people. Magical bodies are bodies that have negative things done to them so other people can be conformable. Magical bodies are seen as self-generating, and as not requiring any investment from the state or from other people.” It is in the mundane that the members of my family represented in this body of work are consistently confronted with the reality of what it means to be a Magical Body. More importantly, it is in the mundane that my family has continued to live, love, and celebrate our existence. The body of work titled Magical bodies is an exploration of the lack of representation of Black people figures in art historical canon. This work focuses on making space for Black figures to counter act the notion of erasure in the canon.

Master of Arts, Case Western Reserve University, 2011, History

This master's thesis examines Jewish and African American relations in Cleveland, Ohio from 1900 to 1970. It argues that interactions between Jews and African Americans in the North have been forged by their history of shared urban space which fostered inter-reliance between Jewish entrepreneurs and their black customers. While this African American-Jewish inter-reliance has been explored in the context of civil rights, an examination of street-level interactions in shared urban spaces such as Jewish-run corner-stores, nightclubs, music shops, housing, and even criminal enterprises reveals that relations between African Americans and Jews have been driven as much by entrepreneurship, markets, and patterns of consumption as by their history as two oppressed peoples. Although this study focuses on Cleveland, it also illustrates some of the basic dynamics of demographic change and inter-ethnic activity in urban America during the twentieth century.

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2015, Leadership and Change

This study is a leadership biography which provides, through the lens of Black feminist thought, an alternative view and understanding of the leadership of Black women. Specifically, this analysis highlights ways in which Black women, frequently not identified by the dominant society as leaders, have and can become leaders. Lessons are drawn from the life of Anna Julia Cooper that provides new insights in leadership that heretofore were not evident. Additionally, this research offers provocative recommendations that provide a different perspective of what leadership is among Black women and how that kind of leadership can inform the canon of leadership. Cooper's voice in advocacy, education, community service, and involvement in the Black Women's Club Movement are the major themes in which evidence of her leadership is defined. This leadership biography moves beyond the western hegemonic point of view and the more traditional ways of thinking about leadership, which narrowly identify effective leaders and ways of thinking about leadership development. The findings of this study propose an alternative view of leadership that calls attention to the following critical elements: 1. Black women carry the co-identifers, gender and race, which continue to be nearly nonexistent in leadership theories, discourse, and mainstream leadership literature. 2. The positivist view, as being the only legitimate knowledge claim, must continue to be challenged. 3. There is a need to correct and update our history, making it more inclusive of all human beings. This leadership biography centers on the notion that Cooper, as a quintessential leader, remains paradoxical. For the most part, she continues to be an unknown figure to most Americans, both Black and White. Yet, remnants of Cooper's ideology and leadership are prolific. It is precisely this dissonance between Cooper the undervalued figure and Cooper the scholar/activist leader that is being analyzed in this study. Under (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2023, Educational Leadership

Over time, Lincoln Heights High School has seemingly been erased from history. With the exception of a Facebook group and a few articles about state championships that were won during its final year of operation, there is no information on the internet or in published books or research about the high school. This research project aims to fill the void in the literature about Lincoln Heights High School. Data for this project were collected through a combination of oral histories and archival documents to unpack the trials and triumphs of a school that aimed to provide a quality education for its students despite having insurmountable budget issues that inevitably led to its closure. The purpose of this research is to understand the unique case of Lincoln Heights High School as it was one of the few Black schools in Ohio. What were the experiences of Black educators who taught at Lincoln Heights High School? The teachers' narratives highlighted that the staff was more than willing to work with the limited resources that they had in an attempt to educate students and build community. From the archival documents, the main takeaway is that there were so many external forces attempting to hinder the Lincoln Heights community. The battles over land and industrial tax revenue caused Lincoln Heights to be a landlocked community without the opportunity of expanding or generating substantial tax dollars from industry. Gerrymandering was the legal method used to ensure that thriving communities around Lincoln Heights were able to create the hopeless situation for the largest all Black town in the United States. Policies are the reason for the dire situation that the Lincoln Heights community and high school found themselves in. These findings indicate the need for an analysis of school funding in Ohio. The funding model that Ohio utilizes has been deemed illegal, but the model still exists. This model is what also forced the closure of Lincoln Heights High School and con (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Arts Administration, Education and Policy

This historical research study situates the pedagogical work of Dr. Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs (1915-2010) within the histories of art education. By situating a Black women art educator into the histories of art education during the 1940s-1960s, the history of art education must be reconsidered. By tracing and crafting a bridge from the work of Carter G. Woodson and the concept of fugitive pedagogies to Dr. Burroughs, a clearer picture of the art classroom within de facto segregated high schools emerges. Utilizing alternative historical methods such as microhistory, critical fabulation, and place-based methodologies, Margaret's educational career comes into focus, challenging the dominant narratives within histories that continue to obfuscate the work of Black art teachers. The analysis first looks at Margaret's biographical information prior to becoming a teacher, including her experiences within the school systems of Louisiana and Chicago. From there, I trace the ways that art education became a major theme in her life, and the ways that her art teachers worked to provide her the opportunity to become an art educator. The second section focuses on two different layers of analysis: one utilizing the tenets of fugitive pedagogies to deepen our understanding of Margaret's work in her high school classroom; the second focusing on the importance of place and how being in Bronzeville and dedicating herself to her community impacted her and gave her a reason to leave the classroom and become the head of the DuSable Museum of African American History.

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2017, History

During the antebellum era, black activists organized themselves into insurgent networks, with the goal of achieving political and racial equality for all black inhabitants of the United States. The Negro Convention Movement, herein referred to as the Black Convention Movement, functioned on state and national levels, as the chief black insurgent network. As radical black rights groups continue to rise in the contemporary era, it is necessary to mine the historical origins that influence these bodies, and provide contexts for understanding their social critiques. This dissertation centers on the agency of the participants, and reveals a black insurgent network seeking its own narrative of liberation through tactics and rhetorical weapons. This study follows in the footing of Dr. Howard Holman Bell, who produced bodies of work detailing the antebellum Negro conventions published in the 1950s and 1960s. Additionally, this work inserts itself into the historiography of black radicals, protest movements, and racial debates of antebellum America, arguing for a successful interpretation of black insurgent action. Class, race, gender, religion, and politics, all combine within this study as potent framing devices. Together, the elements within this effort, illustrates the Black Convention Movement as the era's premier activist organization that inadvertently pushed the American nation toward civil war, and the destruction of institutionalized slavery.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2023, History

Environmental history is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand how human-environment relationships and ecosystems have changed over time. Even with a focus on natural spaces, environmental history often examines land via socio-political barriers. This thesis aims to reconstruct that narrative by examining history through an ecosystem boundary. This collection of Great Black Swamp environmental history essays examines the use of place within a swampland ecosystem. It demonstrates the paradox of environmental history that humans can create affective connections to place and make decisions that harm those landscapes by examining the environment through a narrow and utilitarian perspective, ignoring interconnections. Chapters examine the erasure of environmental change at Fort Meigs Historic Site, Representative Delbert Latta “seeing like the state” in making 1970-80s environmental policy decisions, and the performative tradition of Earth Day at Bowling Green State University. While communities have an affective connection to the swampland, those relationships are changing and shifting in meaning. They must be critically analyzed and adapted, especially in an environment rapidly shifting from anthropocentric climate change.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, History

This dissertation examines the careers of African American members of Congress from the election of Oscar DePriest, the first African American elected in the 20th Century in 1928, through the early years of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1973. It examines the interactions with and contributions of Black members of Congress to the broader Civil Rights and Black Power movements during this period and their relationship with electoral politics. It shows how Black members both played fundamental roles in passing major pieces of Civil Rights legislation during this period and how without their work and input these laws would have been weaker. Simultaneously, it shows how the demands and realities of electoral politics constrained the scope of Black members' legislative efforts, but also how these members actively took steps to advance partisan political goals at the expense of activists because they believed that their work was the best and sometimes only legitimate form of Black activism. Building upon scholarship in both history and Political Science, it contributes to our understanding of the scope of Black political power in the United States prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the impact it had. Simultaneously, it compliments the literature on the Civil Rights and Black Power eras that focus on grassroots movements as the main agents of change by showing how the connections between many Black activists and Black Congressmen helped passed landmark legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but also how Black members came to distance themselves from those activists as they failed to monopolize Black political action around themselves to the detriment of both their own political agenda and that of activists.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

The emergence of a nationwide transgender community in the United States is popularly understood as a new phenomenon. However, a small but growing body of scholarship demonstrates that transgender communities have long existed and played important roles in shaping changing conceptions of sex and gender, as well as color and race. Historians Joanne Meyerowitz and Susan Stryker describe the emergence of transgender communities following World War II, centering their accounts in large coastal cities. Coalitions at the Crossroads: Midwestern Trans Movements, 1945-2000 adds significantly to this research by documenting the lives and political mobilizations of transgender people in the Post-War Midwest, focusing on transgender women of color and the role of transphobia in maintaining racialized hierarchies. Using oral history interviews to contextualize cultural and archival sources, I chart the history of transgender movements as lived by transgender people and expressed in writing, art, and performance. I argue that, in contrast to activists in California and New York, transgender people in the Midwest formed long-lasting coalitions with lesbians and the women's movement based on shared feminist principles. In response to violence and geographic dispersal, transgender Midwesterners organized distinctive regional networks and participated in both gay cultural spaces and Third World mobilizations. Midwestern transgender feminist coalitions contributed significantly to the shift from a “gay and lesbian” movement to a national LGBT political consciousness. Coalitions at the Crossroads disputes the assumption that transgender women are newcomers to feminism, demonstrating that their movements have long been intertwined with larger feminist and racial justice struggles.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2022, History

My graduate thesis project is a museum exhibit on display through the end of May 2022 at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio which explores the ways in which the newspaper industry in Cincinnati fostered a toxic environment for racial relations in the antebellum era. Editors not only stoked racial tensions to encourage the riots that occurred in 1829, 1836, and 1841, they also shaped the narratives of the riots in their columns to blame the victims and exonerate the perpetrators. What follows is a brief history of the riots, the historiographical research pertaining to the exhibit, and an exploration of the methodological questions I faced when constructing the exhibit.

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2022, Leadership and Change

Reframing Leadership Narratives Through the African American Lens explores the context-rich experiences of Black Museum executives to challenge dominant cultural perspectives of what constitutes a leader. Using critical narrative discourse analysis, this research foregrounds under-told narratives and reveals the leadership practices used to proliferate Black Museums to contrast the lack of racially diverse perspectives in the pedagogy of leadership studies. This was accomplished by investigating the origin stories of African American executives using organizational leadership and social movement theories as analytical lenses for making sense of leaders' tactics and strategies. Commentary from Black Museum leaders were interspersed with sentiments of “Sankofa” which signify the importance of preserving the wisdom of the past in an effort to empower current and future generations. This study contributes to closing the gap between race and leadership through a multidimensional lens, while amplifying lesser-known histories, increasing unexplored narrative exemplars, and providing greater empirical evidence from the point of view of African American leaders. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, History

While much has been written about white fears over the “danger” of interracial marriage, little has been devoted to understanding black perspectives—how Black Americans thought and talked about the topic. This dissertation examines debates among Black Americans about interracial marriage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many personally opposed interracial marriage, but they publicly defended and fought for the legal right to such unions. Their fight became an integral part of the battle to gain basic citizenship rights and helped forge a collective identity as they offered, and argued over, competing solutions for racial advancement and visions of the future of the race. Examining Black Americans' internal debates reveals much about their intra-racial tensions, intraracial cooperation, racial identity formation, and the evolution of thought and strategy over time. The dissertation uncovers a vigorous debate with a diverse set of opinions, paradoxes, and complex implications for African American and American history. Black proponents and opponents of interracial marriage alike sought their race's collective advancement and attainment of rights and did so in part by projecting a particular community image. The study therefore engages with notions of respectability, uplift, patriarchy, power, privilege, gender, and sexuality. Altogether, the study broadens understanding of “the Long Civil Rights Movement.”

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2019, History

This project deals with the Black struggle for civil and human rights in Chicago during the 1960s. Because much of the scholarship dealing with Black Chicago focuses on the Chicago Freedom Movement, an actual event led by King and SCLC between 1965 and 1967, this project places emphasis primarily on the years prior to its inception. There are two groups that emerged during the Chicago campaign that are the center of this project: The Chicago Area Friends of SNCC and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations. The CAFOS, heavily influenced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was founded in 1962 to raise money and collect resources for SNCC workers in the South. However, they would eventually go on to begin their own battle against racism and discrimination in Chicago. The Council on the other hand, was a coalition of influential civil rights organizations that established a strong united front against existing white power structures in the city, namely the administrations of Mayor Richard Daley and Superintendent Benjamin Willis. I argue that there was a strong local movement taking place in Chicago prior to the CFM; a movement that has frequently been overshadowed if not erased. By looking more closely at the early Chicago movement and organizations such as CAFOS and the Council, it is clear that Chicago was a place of complex racial and political insurgency. These organizations laid the ground work for the CFM. These instances of activism in Chicago during the early 1960s reveal how issues of race affected those in the Midwest while also demonstrating the various ways in which Midwesterners and urban, Black citizens reacted to and engaged in the ongoing struggle for freedom.

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2017, Leadership and Change

The dissertation is a deep study of an iconic 20th century female, African American leader whose acclaim developed not only from her remarkable first generation post-Reconstruction Era beginnings, but also from her mid-century visibility among Negroes and some Whites as a principal spokesperson for her people. Mary Jane McLeod Bethune arose from the Nadir- the darkest period for Negroes after the Civil War and three subsequent US Constitutional Amendments. She led thousands of Negro women, despite social adversity, to organize around their own aspirations for improved social and material lives among America's diverse citizens., i.e. “the melting pot.” The subject of no fewer than thirty-two dissertation studies, numerable biographies, innumerable awards, and namesake educational institutions, Bethune ascended to public leadership roles. Her renown of the first five decades of the 20th century is reconstructed to be less enigmatic for people of African descent, and more visible for other mainstream Americans. Remarkably, she employed a uniquely crafted philosophy of interactional destiny for the world's “races” anchored in her brand of Christian evangelism. Bethune's uniquely early feminist worldview and strategies for inter-racial cooperation, different than the worldviews of some of her contemporaries, achieved much social capital and opened doors of opportunity for herself and countless others through a brief federal government position, and organized women's work before 1955. Since much of her meta-narrative was riddled with hagiography and myth, this study has fettered out some myths and eradicated some of the hagiography. The study combines primary sources, secondary sources, photo-ethnography, and hermeneutics to illuminate another pathway for future leadership students and organization developers to appropriate aspects of Bethune's 20th century leadership performance as their own. Unintended to merely applaud Dr. Bethune's leadership performance, this stud (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2015, American Culture Studies

This paper explores the untold history of the Black community of Portsmouth and Scioto County, Ohio. It provides a brief overview of the national and state level political and cultural context in which this story is told. This project is limited in both scope and in resources, and as such, while some information about Scioto County's early history in relation to Black citizens is included for context, this research is focused mainly on the struggle for integration of the Portsmouth City School system in 1885, and the larger political and cultural context in which these events took place. This story not only highlights the struggles that members of the Black community in the area have faced, but also demonstrates the abundance of Black history in Scioto County, and the causes of the erasure of this history. The folklore of the county itself, like the Floodwall Mural project's artistic summary, omits the rich Black history of the county. This paper argues the historical importance of the Black community to this particular place, a cultural and racial crossroads in the nineteenth century, and being a larger conversation about the role of Black citizens in Scioto County history. Additionally, this paper purposes to situate Portsmouth in the broader social and political culture of the nineteenth century.

Master of Arts in History, Youngstown State University, 2010, Department of Humanities

Mount Hope Cemetery, on the East Side of Youngstown, is surrounded by neighborhoods that started as rural outposts to a city, then expanded during the city's industrial age. Anchored to demographic statistics, event timelines, and national trends, cemeteries are a solid historic document. Mount Hope Cemetery reflects trends of the United States, in general, and the industrial rise of Youngstown, in particular.At the height of Youngstown's steel-based economy, the communities adjacent to Mount Hope became urban, working class neighborhoods. The ethnicity of the community started as a mixture of German, Italian and Slovakian cultures with a small contingent of African Americans. Subsequently, the population shifted to predominantly African American, with a significant Hispanic contingent. The decline of Mount Hope, as an active and fully maintained cemetery, mirrored the decline of the surrounding neighbors. Chapter One details the physical layout of the cemetery, and follows its history of ownership. Legal records, deeds, wills and topographic evidence are the foundation of Chapter One. Chapter Two is a detailed study of Mount Hope's interred. Information from headstones, grave markers, coupled with grave orientation and location, put each of the interred in proper context during the life of the cemetery. Chapter Three focuses on the neighborhoods adjacent to Mount Hope. Demographic changes in the neighborhoods were reflected by representation in the cemetery itself. Chapter Three documents the cemetery through categorization and grouping like elements within the cemetery. Chapter Four, the final chapter, is a look into the lives and circumstances of individuals interred in Mount Hope selected at random.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), University of Dayton, 2008, Theology

In his seminal work, The History of Black Catholics in the United States, Dom Cyprian Davis O.S.B. attempted to set a broader framework within which “future historical research” at the local level might occur. This dissertation is one such academic endeavor. Building on the historical work of both Davis and Joseph H. Lackner S.M., this dissertation examines the nature of the “cry for justice” as it was communicated in the American Catholic Tribune, a weekly, nineteenth century, black newspaper printed by Daniel A. Rudd, an influential African American Catholic publisher, educator and civil rights leader. During the years of this newspaper's publication, 1886-1897, Rudd promoted an ecclesiologically-centered vision of justice which presumed for the Catholic Church an essential role in the establishment of race justice in America. An examination of Rudd's life and work reveals that though Rudd agitated for full equality for African Americans throughout his life, three distinct approaches can be discerned which roughly correspond to three periods in his life. During the Springfield Period, 1881-1886, Rudd promoted a “Fredrick Douglass-like” political/judicial activist approach. During the Cincinnati/Detroit Period, 1887-1897, he championed an ecclesiologically-centered approach. Finally, throughout the Southern Period, from 1900 onward, the Catholic laymen advocated a “Booker T. Washington-like” economic, self-help approach for achieving full equality for blacks.

PHD, Kent State University, 2013, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

From 1880-1920 the United States struggled to incorporate former slaves into the citizenship of the nation. Constitutional amendments legislated freedom for African Americans, but custom dictated otherwise. White people equated power and wealth with whiteness. Conversely, blackness suggested poverty and lack of opportunity. Straddling the Color Line is a multi-city examination of influential and prominent African Americans who lived with one foot in each world, black and white, but who in reality belonged to neither. These influential men lived lives that mirrored Victorian white gentlemen. In many cases they enjoyed all the same privileges as their white counterparts. At other times they were forced into uncomfortable alliances with less affluent African Americans who looked to them for support, protection and guidance, but with whom they had no commonalities except perhaps the color of their skin. This dissertation argues two main points. One is that members of the black elite had far more social and political power than previously understood. Some members of the black elite did not depend on white patronage or paternalism to achieve success. Some influential white men developed symbiotic relationships across the color line with these elite African American men and they treated each other with mutual affection and respect. The second point is that the nadir in race relations occurred at different times in different cities. In the three cities studied, the nadir appeared first in Charleston, then New Orleans and finally in Cleveland. Although there were setbacks in progress toward equality, many blacks initially saw the setbacks as temporary regressions. Most members of the elite were unwilling to concede that racism was endemic before the onset of the Twentieth Century. In Cleveland, the appearance of significant racial oppression was not evident until after the World War I and resulted from the Great Migration. Immigrants from the Deep South migrated to the Nor (open full item for complete abstract)

Ed.D., Antioch University, 2024, Education

Black neighborhoods have played a critical role in creating safe spaces and fostering resistance for Black individuals (Fullilove, 2016; Haymes, 1995). However, systemic racism has contributed to negative outside perceptions of Black spaces (Faber, 2021; Imbroscio, 2021). Further, stigmatizing language has helped to justify the displacement or erasure of these spaces (Faber, 2021; Porter & Yiftachel, 2019; Safransky, 2014; Slater, 2009; Yiftachel, 1998). Despite the contributions that Black communities have made and continue to make, common curricula often exclude positive stories about Black communities (E. Ross, 2017; Epstein, 2009; Zinn & Macedo, 2005). In this dissertation, I propose a curriculum based on critical race theory to address the common misperceptions of Black spaces. Using anti-racist pedagogy and strength-based perspectives, the curriculum examines the historical and current context of one historically Black neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri: the Ville. The curriculum leads students through exercises to unpack systems of oppression that have shaped perceptions of this community. Additionally, the curriculum centralizes the stories of community members. This curriculum will act as a model for other teachers around the country who might want to design a curriculum celebrating a local historic Black neighborhood in their city. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).