Keynote
Dr. Karlos K. Hill is Regents’ Professor and Presidential Professor of History and Black Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Hill is the author of three books: Beyond The Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory, The Murder of Emmett Till: A Graphic History, and The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History. His book on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre won the 2022 Lynn McIntoch Award for Excellence. Dr. Hill founded the Tulsa Race Massacre Oklahoma Teacher’s Institute to support teaching the history of the race massacre to thousands of middle school and high school students. He also serves on the boards of the Clara Luper Legacy Committee and the Board of Scholars for Facing History and Ourselves. He currently writes a series for The Nation magazine featuring the stories and work of community activists organizing for justice in Black communities.
Visualizing Racial Violence and Resistance
Prof. Adam McKinney is a dancer, choreographer, and activist. He danced professionally with many of the world’s most renowned companies, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. With his husband, Daniel Banks, he is the Co-Director of Fort Worth-based DNAWORKS, an arts and service organization committed to healing through the arts and dialogue. Recently appointed to an Associate Professor of Dance, he is the first tenured Black professor in the College of Fine Arts at TCU. His research examines the intersections of the arts, community healing, and liberation. Named one of the most influential African Americans in Milwaukee, WI by St. Vincent DePaul, he holds a B.F.A. in Dance Performance (Butler University) and an M.A. in Dance Studies with concentrations in Race and Trauma theories (NYU-Gallatin). Adam serves as the President of Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice and as the co-Secretary of Transform 1012 N. Main Street, the project to transform Fort Worth’s former KKK auditorium.
Tammie Rubin is an artist whose sculptural practice considers the intrinsic power of objects as signifiers, wishful contraptions, and mythic relics while investigating themes such as Black migration, magical thinking, longing, and identity. Recent exhibitions include Project Row Houses, Houston, TX., the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY., The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, TX., and C24 Gallery, New York, NY. Born and raised in Chicago, Rubin lives in Austin, Texas where she is an Associate Professor of Ceramics & Sculpture at St. Edward’s University.
Teaching Racial Violence and Resistance
Dr. Lawrence Scott has served over 23 years as a scholar-practitioner in urban education. He was a teacher, district-level curriculum Social Studies specialist, school counselor, and administrator for San Antonio ISD. In 2018, he was awarded the San Antonio Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 Man of the Year. Currently, Dr. Scott is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at Texas A&M University-San Antonio, where his research specialty is school and community relations, multicultural practices in educational leadership and curriculum development. He is also the executive director of the Community for Life Foundation, a non-profit that has given over half a million dollars to over 327 students nationwide. He also led a nationwide advisory team of experts that advised the Texas State Board of Education in the passage and implementation of the African American Studies Course curriculum for high schools in Texas. He has done community outreach trainings for organizations, schools, universities such as Teach for America, Catholic Charities, Community in Schools, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Educational Testing Services (ETS), and the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs.
Dr. Kate Shuster directs the Hard History Project, an initiative that helps museums and archives change interpretations of difficult events in co-creation with K-12 teachers. She consults frequently with interpretive sites and educational institutions. She was the lead author of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Hard History report and its frameworks for teaching the intertwined histories of slavery and settler colonialism in what is currently known as the United States.
Histories of Resistance
Roseann Bacha-Garza is the Program Manager of the Community Historical Archaeology Project with Schools (CHAPS) Program and a Lecturer of Anthropology at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg, Texas. She was a 2021 nominee for Texan of the Year by the Dallas Morning News for research regarding freedom seekers and pathways to freedom through Texas and into Mexico. She is dedicated to cultural heritage preservation and community engaged scholarship along the US-Mexico borderlands.
Dr. Kalenda Eaton is the Director of Oklahoma Research for the Black Homesteaders Project and an Associate Professor of African & African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is a Humanities scholar focused on African American western studies, intersections of Black literary and gender studies; African American social and cultural history; and Black Diaspora studies. She is the author of several publications on African American experience in the American West, and is widely known for her teaching and public scholarship on what the experiences of African Americans living in the Great Plains region can teach us about American cultural politics.
Dr. Todd Moye is a Distinguished Teaching Professor, the Fenton Wayne Robnett Professor of U.S. History, and the Director of the Oral History Program at the University of North Texas. The author of several books and articles on this history of civil rights movements in the U.S., his most recent project is titled Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas. Moye co-edited the book, which has just been published by the University of Texas Press, and co-directed the oral history project of the same name.
Commemoration and Memorialization of Racial Violence and Resistance
Dr. Jeffrey L. Littlejohn serves as Professor of History at Sam Houston State University. A native of Dallas, Texas, he received his BA at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, and his MA and PhD in History at the University of Arkansas. Dr. Littlejohn has published widely on racial violence, civil liberties, and civil rights.
His digital projects include Lynching in Texas and Study the Past.
Melissa Thiel grew up in Grayson County, TX and graduated from Tom Bean High School. She received her Associate’s Degree from Grayson College and then went on to study at Texas Woman’s University where she received her Bachelor’s Degree in History as well as her Master’s Degree in History with an emphasis in Public History. Melissa is the chairperson for the 1930 Sherman Riot Marker Committee, a local organization with the goal to remember the 1930 Sherman Riot through community involvement and an historical marker at the courthouse square.
Writing Racial Violence and Resistance
Dr. Evie Shockley, a Lannan Literary Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist, is the author of four books of poetry, including suddenly we (forthcoming, March 2023) and the Hurston/Wright Award-winning books the new black and semiautomatic. Her scholarly work has been published in her book Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, and in such journals and volumes as The Black Scholar, New Literary History, The New Emily Dickinson Studies, and The Cambridge Companion to American Modernist Poetry. Shockley serves as Editor for Poetry at Contemporary Literature and is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.
Dr. LaToya Watkins’s writing has been published in various publications and she has received grants, scholarships, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and A Public Space. She holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas. Her debut novel, Perish, was published in 2022.
Histories of Violence
Dr. Terry Anne Scott is an award-winning historian, author, and speaker whose research and teaching interests focus largely on lynching, urban history, the intersection of sports and race, African American social and cultural history, and political and social movements. She is the author of several books, including Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas and the forthcoming From Bed-Stuy to the Hall of Fame: The Unexpected Life of Lenny Wilkens. She is also the editor of Seattle Sports: Play, Identity, and Pursuit in the Emerald City. Additionally, Dr. Scott serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Sports History. Dr. Scott recently resigned from her position as History Department Chair at Hood College to serve as Director of the Institute for Common Power.
Dr. Michael Phillips is a scholar of American race relations, Texas history, right-wing politics, and apocalyptic religions. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. His first book, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, won the 2007 Texas Historical Commission’s prize for best book on Texas history. Phillips received the Baylor University Charlton Oral History Research Grant in 2013 to record the experiences of alumni and former professors at Texas’ Historical Black Colleges and Universities from the 1940s to the early 21st century. In 2019, he was named one of the first group of community college professors to receive a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Community College research fellowship for his project on the history of eugenics in the state of Texas. Phillips and his wife and research partner Betsy Friauf, are under contract with the University of Oklahoma Press to write an upcoming book, The Strange Career of Eugenics in Texas, 1854-1940. This past May, he was named a senior research fellow at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.