In this episode, we hear from guest David Walton, history professor and founding director of the Global Black Studies program at Western Carolina University. Walton takes the listener back to his childhood, when he developed an interest in reading foundational works by public intellectuals like Malcolm X, Bobby Seale, and Huey Newton. After stints with teaching and military service, Walton returned to those readings and dug deeper into histories both global and local— even discovering connections among his own family—as he completed dual PhD degrees.

Episode web page and show notes

“Centering the voice of working people is so important to the work that I do.” -Dr. Williams

In this episode, host Augustus Wood talks to Labor Studies professor—and self-described “historian of the working people”—Naomi R Williams (Rutgers University), whose research in southeast Wisconsin labor history sheds new light on the pivotal role of Black workers in forging and leveraging union solidarity in the 1970s and 80s. Throughout their work, Williams emphasizes the importance of keeping workers' voices at the center—especially those typically missing from the historical narrative.

As Wood says, “Those of us that do this kind of work, we see the people as the engines of history, the living archive.”

Some of the books noted during their conversation include Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South by Robert R. Korstad, Continually Working: Black Women, Community Intellectualism, and Economic Justice in Postwar Milwaukee by Crystal Moten, and The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the 21st Century by Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta.

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In the this episode, host Augustus Wood talks to legendary writer, scholar, and trade unionist Bill Fletcher Jr. They cover Fletcher’s storied life from his early years as a teen activist and then college, labor organizing, and leadership in the Black Radical Congress, among other experiences. Today, Fletcher is a frequent columnist and contributor to a number of media outlets, speaking on social justice, labor, and electoral and international politics.

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In this season opener, host Augustus Wood and guest Joe William Trotter Jr. (history and social justice, Carnegie Mellon University) engage in a deep discussion of Black working class history, grounded in Trotter's pathbreaking research and published works, notably Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 and Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America.

Trotter illuminates an often-untold story: that Black labor was essential to the building of industrial America and that workers "produced and enriched the cities in which they lived." Wood and Trotter unpack why the story of Black labor must include not only workers' agency and productivity, but also an accounting of the struggles experienced then and now. Note: this episode was recorded in May 2022.

Show notes and transcript

 In Episode 5, guest Alonzo Ward (history, Eastern Illinois University) and host Augustus Wood explore the less well known threads of American labor history, specifically Black labor in Illinois. Beyond any easy, simplified reading of the past—Black workers as "strike breakers," for example—they ask listeners to look deeper at the real, lived conditions and context of people's lives.

As history is written, are the subjects' voices part of the narrative? Is the multifaceted nature of their lives, in all of its complexity, incorporated into the analysis? As they discuss the importance of agency and complicating the story of Black labor in the 19th and 20th centuries, Ward and Wood find connections to labor trends unfolding today.  View Episode 5 show notes and transcript.

Episode 4’s featured guest recently received the Pearl Birnbaum Hurwitz Award for Humanism in Healthcare, which honors a woman who exemplifies humanism and has advanced the well-being of underserved or vulnerable populations in the healthcare arena. It’s a fitting honor for Dr. Ruby Mendenhall, whose extensive interdisciplinary research and publicly engaged work focuses on building healthy, equitable communities—with those communities solidly at the center, working together on solutions.

In this episode, Mendenhall discusses the interconnection of racial oppression, trauma, and violence with both physical and mental health. Learn about her current projects, including a MacArthur-funded initiative to create programming and wellness tools (such as art and a forthcoming wellness store) to foster healing from racial trauma in Black and Latinx high school students and young adults living in Chicago. Along the way, she highlights the scholars, works, and mentors who informed her path forward. Visit the show notes and transcript. 

“You're responsible for one whole bookshelf of mine,” Augustus Wood declares at one point in his interview of Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, who takes listeners through a rich list of works and thinkers that have informed her scholarship. Walter Rodney, Patricia Rodney, Winston James, Claudia Jones, Safiya Bukhari, and William Alphaeus Hunton are just a few she highlights, pointing out that some may be less known because of what she terms “intellectual McCarthyism.”

The author and editor of numerous publications herself—including the recent W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History (with co-author Gerald Horne), Organize, Fight, Win, and the forthcoming Black Scare/Red Scare—Burden-Stelly elucidates the deep-rooted, longstanding connections between antiblackness and antiradicalism, and offers a thoughtful take on the state of Black Studies today.

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 Season Two of "Off the Shelf" continues with historian and Illinois alumnus Dr. Edward Onaci (Ursinus College), author of Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State. Through his work, Onaci looks deeply into the history of the New Afrikan Independence Movement—not just in documents and news sources, but through the personal stories of the people who lived it—and the implications for today's Black liberation movement. Host Augustus Wood takes listeners through Onaci's book and more, including a survey of the texts that shaped Onaci's academic and personal path: from rappers Poor Righteous Teachers and Talib Kweli, to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Imari Obadele’s Foundations of the Black Nation, and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother.  
   

Season Two of "Off the Shelf" opens with the fascinating and timely research of Professor Ashley Howard (University of Iowa), a historian whose analysis of 1960s urban rebellions in the Midwest sheds light on contemporary resistance movements to racialized oppression. 

Along the way she reminds the listener of the many ways in which the Black Midwestern experience creates or informs the national narrative. 

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"I have a lot more questions than answers, but I turn my questions into an art practice." In this episode, host Augustus Wood and Professor Stacey Robinson explore numerous threads—from James Baldwin and Frances Cress Welsing to hip-hop historian Jeff Chang, and album cover artists Pedro Bell and Overton Lloyd to the golden age of hip-hop—as they consider questions like What is our vision for a better society? And what are the terms and conditions of Black liberation? They also discuss Robinson's new book with writer Alverne Ball, Across the Tracks: Remembering Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and the Tulsa Race Massacre, which was released this summer on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre.