This Week in Black History, Society, and Culture

In this episode, Dr. Hettie V. Williams is in conversation with Dr. Clare Corbould about Black Internationalism—a growing subfield in African American history. Corbould is a historian specializing in African American cultural and intellectual history. She is currently an Associate Professor of North American History at Deakin University in Australia and the author of Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939 (Harvard University Press, 2009) listed as a Choice “Outstanding Title” and winner of several awards in Australia. She has written articles and book chapters on many topics including on anti-lynching plays, African American ideas about Haiti, and African American cartoonist E. Simms Campbell.

In this episode, Dr. Hettie V. Williams discusses African Americans and American labor history with Dr. Brian Greenberg Emeritus Professor of History at Monmouth University. Williams is an Associate Professor of History at Monmouth University and Greenberg is one of the foremost scholars of U.S. labor history. He is also the author of Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital Workers’ Union Local 1199 (University of Illinois Press, 1989) with Leon Fink. Greenberg is also the author of several other books including The Dawning of American Labor: The New Republic to Industrial Age (Blackwell, 2017), Social History of the United States: The 1900s with Linda S. Watts and numerous scholarly articles, essays and book reviews. Here he takes us through the arc of American labor history and the connections between this history and the Black freedom struggle.

In this episode, Hettie V. Williams discusses the Black Church in film and television with Dr. Anwar Uhuru. Williams is Associate Professor of African American history at Monmouth University and Uhuru is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies and an affiliate faculty member with the departments of Philosophy and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Their research focuses on human value based on race, gender, sexuality, and ableism with publicans in the Journal of Hip Hop Studies, The APA Newsletter, Philosophy and the Black Experience, and Radical Philosophy Review. They are also known for teaching popular courses at Wayne State on Black Detroit and Politics and Culture in Anglophone Caribbean. In this episode, they discuss with Williams the satire Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul a recent film by Monkeypaw Productions and executive producer Jordan Peele directed by Adamma Ebo. They also discuss the Black Church in film and tv more generally in this episode. This film about the Black megachurch culture in the American South is currently viewable on Netflix.

In this episode, Hettie V. Williams discusses Black in graduate school with Lauren T. Rorie. Williams is Associate Professor of African American history at Monmouth University and Rorie is currently an adjunct professor in the perspectives program at Monmouth. She discusses her experiences as a Black student at the undergraduate and graduate level and provides Black graduate students with advice on how to navigate PWIs as graduate students or part time instructors in their post graduate life. Rorie has recently been accepted into several prestigious graduate programs in history.

In this episode, Hettie V. Williams discusses jailing and mass incarceration with Dr. Melanie D. Newport. Williams is Associate Professor of African American History at Monmouth University and Newport is an Assistant Professor of history at the University of Connecticut and the author of This is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). This conversation is structured mainly around Newport’s recently published book on jailing with a focus on the Cook County Jail in Chicago. In this text, Newport argues that jailing has been central to the mass incarceration project in the modern history of the United States. She links jailing to local politics and, also, community activism. Newport contends that there is a longer history of mass incarceration connected to racialized “politically repressive” jailing. She includes in this history a discussion of a host of historical actors key to this history such as wardens, correction officers, sheriffs, jailed people themselves and the network of community activists who sought to reform and imagine “their jail.” This is a groundbreaking work in the ever-expanding history of the carceral state.