Today’s conversation is with Professor Charles McKinney, author of the 2010 book Greater Freedom: The Evolution of Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina and the co-editor of two fantastic volumes: An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee with Aram Goudsouzian from 2018 and the recently released From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of Black Freedom Struggle with Françoise Hamlin. McKinney is an historian by training and is one of the founding faculty members in the Department of Africana Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.

You’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is between collaborators on this project, Ashley Newby and John E. Drabinski. As colleagues in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at University of Maryland, they share a deep commitment to the field and in the inaugural conversation of this series, they explore what they find so engaging about the area of study, what is compelling about its past, and what they hope to see as part of its future.