Me the Author and Scholar-Activist
I was born and raised in New Orleans. The city’s heat and spices run through my veins, so I’m passionate about my life’s work. I have been an author, orator, educator, researcher, and activist for over three decades. The search for justice amid social inequities inspires my writing and creative work.
More specifically, a commitment to Black education and the freedom struggle has guided my work as a youth counselor, high school history teacher, and education professor at Emory University and Georgia State University in Atlanta. I am the cofounder and director of the New Orleans-based Urban South Grassroots Research Collective (USGRC), a coalition with Black community groups that melds bottom-up education research and racial justice organizing.
Community-driven research that elevates Black experience, culture, knowledge, and education is central to my work in New Orleans. In solidarity with African American communities, I aim to build and realize a new vision of racial and educational justice that is place-based and rooted in history. This means having feet on sinking below-sea-level sidewalks, convening at kitchen tables, participating in protests, and meeting in classrooms and community bookstores. It means knowing the culture and history that have shaped Black life in New Orleans. I am not the traditional researcher who stands aside, observes, and then retreats to write.
The long-term relationships that I have fostered in New Orleans enable my work to unfold organically and in ways that are responsive and accountable to community members and their concerns. My work has consistently focused on challenging educational inequities, especially those related to privatization and charter schools, and restoring neighborhood public schools that reflect the culture, history, and aspirations of Black communities; defending civil rights that are under assault; and documenting and advancing the city’s legacy of Black struggle and resistance as part of a broader freedom movement.
As a white antiracist, I approach my work with humility and credit Black elders, teachers, and community members for their mentorship. I have learned more from them than my doctoral studies could ever provide. I believe that attaining racial equity is not only the measure of real justice for communities of color but correlated with collective well-being for all of humanity. Life in the Deep South has profoundly influenced my identity and critical stance on racism.
My book Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance chronicles the state takeover of New Orleans public schools and the struggle of communities to defend neighborhood schools. With veteran teachers and students, I co-authored Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City: Stories of Dispossession and Defiance from New Orleans. It includes firsthand narratives about the cultural importance of Black schools and neighborhoods and the threat to their integrity in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the top-down policies that followed.
My most recent book, coming July 2025, is What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans High School. It uses oral histories and archives that span a half century to document the legacy of a Black public high school in New Orleans—and Black teachers’ contributions—prior to the school’s closure and replacement by privately managed charter schools. I have likewise published several other books.
I have written in scholarly journals such as Harvard Educational Review, Peabody Journal of Education, Race Ethnicity and Education, and elsewhere. Additionally, I have published in grassroots venues, including the New Orleans Tribune and The Progressive magazine. By invitation, I have spoken at Columbia, Dillard, Fordham, Loyola, Harvard, Tulane, and other universities. At the same time, I have participated in and organized community forums in New Orleans as well as Atlanta, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Nashville, and other cities affected by school closings, assaults on community culture, and inequities generated by top-down policies and privatization.
I am past associate editor for the Journal of Education Policy, sit on the editorial board of Race Ethnicity and Education, and am a fellow of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado–Boulder. I received the Distinguished Scholar-Activist Award by Critical Educators for Social Justice of the American Educational Research Association.
Finally, I serve as a historian and writer for the Plessy and Ferguson Initiative in New Orleans. Founded by descendants of Homer Plessy and Judge John Ferguson of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case that legalized racial segregation in the United States, the initiative is dedicated to antiracist education and the commemoration of Black history.
I hold a doctorate in education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In recent years, I have taken up road cycling as a form of recreation and self-care and ride 400-plus miles a month along the Chattahoochee River in Atlanta.
