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Q&A with 2021 ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellow Camille Goldmon

Earlier this year PhD candidate Camille Goldmon was named a 2021 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. In the following Q&A exchange, Goldmon offers more context about her dissertation, titled “On the Right Side of Radicalism: African American Farmers, Tuskegee Institute, and Agrarian Radicalism in the Alabama Black Belt, 1881–1940.”

What was the genesis of your project, and how has it changed since you first entered graduate school?

I come from a background of Black farmers. My father is a third-generation farmer in Arkansas. I never gave it too much thought until I started noticing that everything I’d ever read about Black farmers was about sharecroppers. This prompted me to do more research on the origins of sharecropping in the US South for an undergraduate capstone paper. That’s when I started to realize the significance of agricultural landownership among Black southerners, particularly those in rural areas. I dug further into landowning African Americans and the challenges they faced for my master’s thesis. For my dissertation, however, I wanted to tell a slightly different story—one of overcoming challenges and dethroning systems of oppression. One that would better capture the narrative of people like my father, grandparents, and great-grandparents who tenaciously persisted in their pursuits of land, but would also shed light on the extent of obstacles deliberately designed to hinder them. That’s how I began focusing on grassroots agricultural activists and organizational leadership like that at Tuskegee Institute between 1881 and 1940. 

What has the research process during dissertation fieldwork been like? 

It goes without saying that the pandemic had totally changed the landscape of dissertation fieldwork, but luckily I’ve been able to get back into the archives over the past couple of months. There’s no way to describe the joy that comes from touching an archival source that you didn’t know existed, but fits perfectly into your research. 

How do digital humanities approaches figure into your work?

I mentioned wanting to expose the obstacles that Black farmers faced. These issues include disparate access to resources such as extension services, loans and grants, and tillable land. I can (and do) use census data, financial figures, and even dialogue to demonstrate the inequities and the effectiveness of efforts to dismantle systemic discrimination. However, I remember the first time I saw the 1939 Home Owners Loan Corporation Map of Chicago that showed redlining and segregated housing practices in the 1930s. And the first time I saw the diagram of the Brookes slave ship that illustrated how enslaved Africans were transported across the Atlantic. I knew about segregated housing and the inhumanity of the Middle Passage, but those visualizations completely upped the ante of my understanding. That’s why my dissertation has a digital component that functions as an online, open-access archive for digitized primary sources, GIS maps, and other visual aids that will hopefully deepen readers’ understanding of my work.

Are you partial to a particular chapter, section, or story from the project so far?

At this point, chapter designations are subject to change, but my favorite narrative thread in the entire project is that which follows individual farmers or farm families who advocated for themselves or used their landowning status to advocate for others. This includes farmers who opened their homes to visiting civil rights workers, which many African Americans in rural areas could not do without fear of eviction from white-owned land or being frozen out of jobs. It also includes those who joined organizations such as the Progressive Farmers and Households Union, Sharecroppers and Tenant Farmers Union, or Alabama Share Croppers Union at risk of violent reprisal against themselves and their families. I love having the privilege of telling these stories of strategy, community, and overall courageousness. 

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Lipstadt Publishes Essay in ‘The Jewish Quarterly’

Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and associated faculty in the History Department, recently published an essay in the relaunch issue of The Jewish Quarterly. The piece, “White insurrectionists: Anti-semitism in America,” examines the roots of far-right extremism in the United States. Read a short excerpt from the piece below, a longer excerpt at Jewish News, and the full article (subscription required) at The Jewish Quarterly.

“[The January 6 U.S. Capitol] assault shocked and surprised many people. It was unprecedented. (The Capitol had been attacked previously, but that was in 1812 by the British, not a swarm of American citizens.)

“I was not, however, surprised by either the insurrection or the antisemitism that was part of it. Rather than an ex nihilo event, it constituted a link in the growing chain of far-right extremist violence.

“During recent years, the United States – as well as much of Europe – has witnessed a decided growth in and sophistication of far-right white-power movements.

“Now that they have emerged more fully into the daylight, it is important that we recognise how the racism and antisemitism within them are inextricably linked.”

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Biden Nominates Klibanoff and Dudley to Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board

President Joe Biden has nominated two Emory experts, Hank Klibanoff and Gabrielle Dudley, to serve on the federal Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board. Klibanoff directs the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project and is the creator and host of Buried Truths, an award-winning podcast that recently finished its third season. Klibanoff is also Associated Faculty in the History Department. Dudley is an instruction archivist with Emory’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, where she works with faculty on course design and integrating resources from the Rose library into their classes. Dudley and Klibanoff have taught together twice. The five-person federal review board will, as the Emory News Center explains, “examine government records of unpunished, racially motivated murders of Black Americans during the modern civil rights era.” The Atlanta-Journal Constitution also covered the nomination in a piece titled, “Civil rights cold case board to have unique Atlanta flavor.” Read more about the nomination of Dudley and Klibanoff at the AJC and via the Emory News Center’s articles, “Two Emory experts nominated to serve on Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board” and “Acclaim: Recent honors for Emory faculty and staff.”

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Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery Joins History Department as Second Cahoon Family Professor of American History

Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, an acclaimed historian and documentary film producer, has been named the second Cahoon Family Professor of American History in the History Department. Lowery, a member of the Lumbee tribe, examines Native culture, identity and migration through an array of scholarly and artistic forms.

She has published two books: The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle (UNC Press, 2018) and the award-winning Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (UNC Press, 2010). She has received fellowships and grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sundance Institute, and the Ford Foundation, among others. She has produced documentary films, including the Peabody Award-winning A Chef’s Life (5 seasons on PBS), the Emmy-nominated Private Violence, and two shorts that premiered at Sundance. Lowry was also recently elected to join the Society of American Historians and to the board of the American Council of Learned Societies.

She is currently Professor in the History Department at UNC-Chapel Hill and the director of UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South. She will join the Emory History Department this coming fall. Read more about Dr. Lowery and the Cahoon Professorships via the Emory News Center’s profile, “Malinda Maynor Lowery named second Cahoon Family Professor in Emory College.”

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Strakhova Awarded Research Fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for European History

Docotral Candidate Anastasiia Strakhova has been awarded a residential research fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz, Germany. The fellowship will provide 12 months of support as Strakhova completes her dissertation, titled “Selective Emigration: Border Control and the Jewish Escape in Late Imperial Russia, 1881-1914.” Strakhova’s graduate work is advised by Drs. Eric Goldstein and Ellie R. Schainker.

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Anderson Pens Op-Ed in ‘The Guardian’: “America’s gun obsession is rooted in slavery”

Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies Dr. Carol Anderson recently wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian. Titled “America’s gun obsession is rooted in slavery,” the article discusses how revolts led by the enslaved, including in the mid-eighteenth century, influenced the framers to cement the right to bear arms and maintain militias in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Anderson connects this history to contemporary discourses around guns, violence, and race. The piece stems from Anderson’s newest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021). Read an excerpt below, along with the full article.

“This function of the militias was so important during the war of independence that governments such as that in South Carolina devoted the lion’s share of their white manpower to the containment of the enslaved. As a result, the colony did not have enough white men to join the Continental Army and repel the British. The calculus was simple: it was more important to the plantation owners in the colonial government to maintain slavery and control Black people than to fight for American independence.

“In other words, concerns about keeping enslaved Black people in check are the context and background to the second amendment. The same holds true for today.”

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Evans Grubbs Quoted in ‘Live Science’ Article on Finding at Roman Cemetery in U.K.

Dr. Judith Evans Grubbs, Betty Gage Holland Professor of Roman History, was recently quoted in a Live Science article titled, “17 decapitated skeletons found at ancient Roman cemetery.” The findings occurred in the course of excavations at three ancient Roman cemeteries in Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom. The piece discusses possible explanations for the decapitations, which some scholars (including Evans Grubbs) think took place in the context of official executions relating to the violation of Roman law. Read an excerpt below along with the full article.

“Still, other scholars thought that these people could have been executed in accordance with Roman law. ‘Official execution seems the best explanation for the Knobb’s Farm cases,’ said Judith Evans Grubbs, a professor of Roman history at Emory University in Atlanta. ‘Official executions would be carried out under the authority of the provincial governor, not local justice, and would reflect imperial ideas of criminality rather than local’ ones, said Grubbs. She noted that women in the Roman Empire were often targets for accusations of sorcery and adultery, both of which could be considered capital crimes by the Romans.”

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Michael Camp (PhD, ’17) Publishes Piece in ‘Salon’

Dr. Michael Camp, a 2017 graduate of the doctoral program, recently published an article in Salon. The piece, “Sorry, Republicans: Joe Biden isn’t Jimmy Carter — and these aren’t the 1970s,” interrogates the comparisons that political opponents of Joe Biden have made between the current U.S. president and ex-president Jimmy Carter. Camp is the author of Unnatural Resources: Energy and Environmental Politics in Appalachia after the 1973 Oil Embargo (University of Pittsburg Press, 2019). Read an excerpt of the Salon piece below along with the full article.

“Perhaps it’s understandable that the Trumps might want to link Biden to Carter, who left office in 1981 in shame, having been thoroughly defeated in his bid for re-election by Ronald Reagan. But the comparison likely won’t stand for long, because our current situation bears little resemblance to the political morass of the late 1970s that doomed Carter’s quest for a second term in office.”

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Anderson Publishes ‘The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America’

Dr. Carol Anderson has published a new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021). Examining the establishment of the right to bear arms in relationship to the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans, Anderson’s work argues that the Second Amendment has consistently kept African Americans “powerless and vulnerable.” Dr. Anderson, who is Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies, Department Chair, and Associated Faculty in the History Department, has spoken about this newest work with multiple media organizations and on a book tour. Find a list of some of the coverage of her newest work below:

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Suddler Discusses Ronald Greene, Athlete Activism, and Kristen Clarke on ‘Black News Channel’

Dr. Carl Suddler, Assistant Professor of History, was recently a featured guest on the Black News Channel. In the interview Suddler discusses the increase of anti-racist and anti-police brutality activism among professional athletes since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, a subject that he recently wrote about in-depth for The Washington Post. Suddler also discusses the police killing of Ronald Greene and the appointment of Kristen Clarke as the first Black woman to lead the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division. Suddler is the author of Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (New York University Press, 2019). Watch the BNC interview here: “Ronald Greene’s death highlights injustice in criminal justice system.”