This is Ashley Newby and 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 with Lee Hawkins, a journalist with The Wall Street Journal and author of the 2025 book I Am Nobody's Slave: How Uncovering My Family's History Set Me Free. In this conversation, we discuss the meaning of personal histories, journalistic work, and the persistence of trauma across time and generation.