and Ph.D. With William Scott, a Kenyon colleague, he ran a humanities seminar on the migration of African Americans from the South to the North.
His course has attracted much grant support and is entitled “North by South: The Great African-American Migration, 1900-1960.” It includes two-week-long field trips where students research archives, documents, and oral-history interviews in two different cities, one from the north and one from the south.
The pairing of two cities, such as Memphis, Tennessee, and Chicago, Illinois, and Birmingham, Alabama, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, studies true migration patterns of southern African Americans to the north.
He and Scott discovered their own connections while researching for books on the arts scene in New York City.
[1] His books cover subjects such as the origins of Bebop, styles of baseball, and social theory in Europe and America.