Conversations in Black Freedom Studies Interviews LaShawn Harris and Max Felker-Kantor
Conversations in Black Freedom Studies (CBFS) is a monthly discussion series held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Curated by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, the series was established as a space to discuss the latest scholarship in Black freedom studies, bringing the campus and community together as scholars and activists challenge the older geography, leadership, ideology, culture, and chronology of Civil Rights historiography. In anticipation of the planned discussion, Stop Killer Cops: Police Brutality, Mass Incarceration, and the Liberal Establishment, scheduled for tomorrow, September 5, we are highlighting the scholarship of two of their guests.
LaShawn Harris is an Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University and Assistant Editor and Book Review Editor for the Journal of African American History. She received her PhD from Howard University in 2007. She is the author of the prize-winning Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners won the Darlene Clark Hine Book Prize (Best Book in African American Women’s and Gender History) from the Organization of American Historians as well as the Philip Taft Book Award (Best Book in American Labor & Working-Class History) from The Labor and Working-Class History Association.
Max Felker-Kantor teaches courses in twentieth-century American and African American history with a focus on race, politics, and social movements. His articles and book chapters have been published in the Journal of Urban History, Journal of Civil and Human Rights, Boom California, Black and Brown Los Angeles: A Contemporary Reader, the Pacific Historical Review, and the Casden Annual Review. Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (2018), Felker-Kantor’s first book, is available from the University of North Carolina Press.