My first book, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America (UNC Press 2013), examines federal employment as a lever and obstacle for racial equality and social mobility in the age of progressive politics. Spanning the period from Reconstruction to the 1920s, Racism in the Nation's Service reveals how the post-Civil War Republican patronage machine supported a growing black middle class in Washington, D.C., and how, in turn, racial discrimination in federal offices during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson implicated the United States government in the economic limitation of African Americans.
I am currently developing a new project that considers the formation and constraints of twentieth-century racial liberalism through a study of the politics of Oswald Garrison Villard, a liberal journalist and founder of the NAACP.
Kluge Fellowship, John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, 2010-2011
2011 James Madison Prize for the best article on the history of the federal government by the Society for History in the Federal Government.
Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
“The (White) Search for (Black) Order: The Phelps-Stokes Fund’s First Twenty Years, 1911-1931,” The Historian 65, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 319-352.
U.S. Political and Social History
African American History