Brett Gadsden, Associate Professor (B.S., James Madison University, 1991; M.A.
University of Massachusetts, 1996; M.A., Northwestern University, 1998; Ph.D.
Northwestern University, 2006.) Research and teaching interests: twentieth century
African American history, African American freedom struggles and politics, post-World
War II America, race and American political development, and law and education.
I am currently working on a book project, tentatively titled From Protest to Politics: The
Making of the “Second Black Cabinet,” JFK to Nixon. I am interested in the set of
historical circumstances, such as rising black electoral power, direct action campaigns in
the south, urban uprisings, and growing popular support for civil rights advances that
brought African Americans—often framed as “racial advisors”—into consultative
relationships with presidential candidates and later into key cabinet, sub-cabinet, and
other important positions in the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations that
opened to them unprecedented access to centers of power in the federal government. This
project offers an alternative to the standard political narratives of American politics that
are largely told through the lens of American presidents in studies of their encounters
with civil rights movements. In foregrounding the rise of these black executives as
historical agents in the history of the American presidency and detailing the thinking and
actions of these figures in the governing process, my project thus indentifies an important
transition in African Americans’ positions in the American polity from consummate
political outsiders, charges of the state, and protestors to civic insiders, policy makers,
and architects of democratic structures that governed all citizens.
My first book is titled Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth
of American Sectionalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). The central focus of
this project is the three decades long effort to desegregate the state’s system of public
education. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, school desegregation proponents won a
series of victories in suits against Jim Crow schools that, in part, provided the evidentiary
basis for the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This
campaign continued through the 1970s, as the problem of school segregation emerged
most pronouncedly as a function of racially segregated housing patterns. After exposing a
record of state-sponsored discrimination in education and housing policy, they secured a
ruling demanding the nation’s first interdistrict, metropolitan desegregation plan.
More broadly, Between North and South explores how historical actors understood the
significance of geographic sectionalism and the ways in which they practiced their
politics either contributed or undermined sectional frameworks. The NAACP’s strategy
targeting school segregation in Delaware, as deployed in the organization’s direct attack
strategy and affirmed by the Supreme Court in Brown, helped to craft and popularize a
very particular meaning of de jure school segregation—defined as Jim Crow decrees that
were inscribed in the states’ highest laws—as a distinctly southern phenomenon in a
manner that advanced racial reforms. In the 1970s however, school desegregation
proponents challenged the sectionally inflected definitions of constitutionally suspect
forms of segregation that had animated previous litigation campaigns. The sum total of
the work of activists in Delaware reveals the dynamism inherent of black challenges to
the varied structures of segregation. This work also demonstrated the extent to which
activists artfully manipulated—alternately embracing and rejecting—the discursive
frameworks that so inform historians’ characterizations of American political culture and
race relations across time and space.
Education
BS, James Madison University, 1991
MA, University of Massachusetts, 1996
MA, Northwestern University, 1998
PhD, Northwestern University, 2006
Courses Taught
AAS 345: The Black Freedom Struggle
AAS 381: Race and the American Presidency
AAS 382: Race and American Political Development
AAS 485: The Georgia Civil Rights Cold Case Project at Emory
University
AAS 490: AAS Senior Seminar
Research and Teaching Interests
Twentieth century African American history
African American freedom struggles and politics
Post-World War II America
Race and American political development
Law and education