My research interests in U.S. history are twentieth-century African-American, policy, and urban history. I am most concerned with the ways that race and public policy intersect in American urban politics. This is reflected in my two major research projects. Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), considers elite African-American reformers and their efforts to use federal programs to improve the lot of Atlanta’s black community against all odds in the Jim-Crow era. My current book project is about the Ford Foundation's engagement with black-power activists in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s. It is a case study to understand the continuities and changes in racial liberalism in this era as its focus shifted from civil-rights integrationism to multiculturalism. I have supervised a number of M.A. theses, including one on the origins of African-American Islam, another on white middle-class anti-integrationist populism in 1970s New York City, and three on the 20th century black Left. My students have published scholarly articles drawn from this research and have been accepted to doctoral programs at Berkeley, Northwestern, Rutgers, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Toronto, as well as to Osgoode Hall Law School.
