I am the 2023-2025 Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Scholar at the Margaret Walker Center. She received her Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University with an M.A. from Johns Hopkins and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. My work examines civil rights, education, and Black women’s activism in the twentieth century. I am writing a manuscript on the intellectual biography of Geraldine L. Wilson. It studies the formation of a Black woman intellectual and her educational activism for Head Start programs in Mississippi and New York. My second research project focuses on the early history of Friends of Children of Mississippi, an antipoverty early childhood education program that operated for eighteen months without significant funding. Both projects demonstrate the self-determination of people and communities seeking to have an educational program of their own.
I am a public historian, oral historian, and digital humanist dedicated to community-based public history projects. Since July 2023, I have volunteered with the Freedom Information Service Library Project, an archival collection on the Mississippi Movement curated by civil rights veteran Jan Hillegas. In support of this work, I became an inaugural faculty fellow for the Institute for Race and Social Transformation at Rhodes College this year. Additionally, I collaborate with cultural institutions and universities to facilitate workshops on community archiving and digital history.