Research Interests
The Dissertation Project
Citizens of Heaven, Citizens of Earth
Institutions, education, and Black citizenship in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1865–1925.
My research begins with a deceptively simple question: after emancipation made formerly enslaved people legally free, what made freedom possible in practice?
The amendments mattered. Federal law mattered. But a person could hold citizenship on paper and still lack a school, a safe place to gather, access to political information, economic independence, or an institution willing to defend that citizenship when it was challenged.
The governing question
How did religious and educational institutions in the Lower Mississippi Valley invest in, facilitate, limit, or withdraw support from Black citizenship between emancipation and the consolidation of Jim Crow — and how did those decisions shape the post-Reconstruction South?
The argument
Citizenship was built through institutions as much as through law.
Schools, churches, mutual-aid societies, political organizations, and educational networks gave legal freedom somewhere to live. They produced the practical capacities of citizenship: literacy, leadership, political participation, economic independence, community organization, and civic belonging.
So I ask what happened when federal commitment to Reconstruction receded. Which institutions kept investing in Black citizenship? Which adapted themselves to the emerging racial order? Which had the resources to act and chose caution, accommodation, or withdrawal?
Black institutions
Churches, schools, mutual-aid organizations, and community networks — the principal infrastructure through which citizenship was practiced and defended.
Protestant institutions
Missionary societies, denominational schools, and congregations that often invested heavily during Reconstruction, with uneven long-term commitment after it.
Catholic institutions
Dioceses, orders, schools, and charities whose hierarchy made them less dependent on local pressure — independence that rarely became advocacy.
The place
The Mississippi River is not the boundary of this story. It is the road through it.
The project centers on the Lower Mississippi Valley around Natchez, Mississippi, and Vidalia, Louisiana — a region that held powerful Catholic institutions, large Protestant populations, Black churches of several traditions, former plantation societies, and active Freedmen’s Bureau operations within one shared geography.
The river connected these communities while preserving real differences in law, politics, religion, and local power. That makes sustained comparison possible: Catholic and Protestant, Black and white, Louisiana and Mississippi, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
- Freedmen’s Bureau schools
- Black churches of several traditions
- Catholic dioceses and religious orders
- Protestant missionary organizations
- Straight University
- New Orleans University
- Tougaloo College
- Rust College
- Black Catholic schools and communities
- Local mutual-aid and political networks
The starting point
The Vidalia Home Farm offers a close view of citizenship under construction.
I begin with Freedmen’s Bureau operations in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, including the largely unexplored Home Farm and the educational work attached to it. Archival evidence suggests it functioned as a transitional institution through which formerly enslaved people pursued education, labor, family reunification, and civic participation under federal supervision.
Here citizenship is not an abstraction. It appears in requests for teachers, school reports, labor complaints, veterans’ claims, relief for people made destitute by flooding, disputes over wages, and the daily question of whether federal authority would keep a promise made to a freedperson.
The Home Farm is small enough to examine closely and connected to everything larger: military government, missionary education, church authority, plantation labor, and Black community formation.
A central problem
What happens when universal moral teaching meets a racial order?
A substantial section of the work reads Catholic social thought against the decades in which Reconstruction collapsed and Jim Crow hardened — In Plurimis (1888) and Rerum Novarum (1891) alongside the choices made by dioceses, schools, religious orders, and Black Catholic communities in Louisiana and Mississippi.
The point is not to assume indifference in advance. It is to trace how moral principles were interpreted, applied, narrowed, redirected, or left unrealized in practice.
Why did the Church develop a sophisticated theology of labor and human dignity at the very moment Black citizenship was being systematically restricted in its own communities?
How this work fits together
The novel, the documentary edition, and the dissertation are related but not the same project. Each asks something the others cannot.
01 · The novel
When We Were Apart enters the human experience of Reconstruction — family, faith, danger, love, education, exile — asking what the archive cannot answer directly while staying accountable to what it makes possible.
02 · The records
The Vidalia Documentary Edition catalogs, transcribes, and publishes surviving Freedmen’s Bureau material on Vidalia and Concordia Parish. Its purpose is access — making scattered, unsearchable records usable by other researchers and by the communities they describe.
03 · The dissertation
Citizens of Heaven, Citizens of Earth moves outward from Vidalia to a broader question about institutional power: who invested in Black citizenship, who did not, and what those choices meant as Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow.
Why it matters
The collapse of Reconstruction was not only political. It was institutional.
Black communities invested their own labor, money, leadership, and organizational capacity in the work of freedom, again and again. But citizenship also depended on whether powerful institutions would keep supplying schools, teachers, buildings, advocacy, funding, protection, and public legitimacy once federal support waned.
Studying those decisions across sixty years connects Reconstruction history, American religious history, the history of education, and Catholic studies — treating schools as more than places of instruction and churches as more than places of worship, but as institutions able to enlarge or constrict the practical meaning of freedom.
The question facing Southern institutions was whether freedom required only formal equality, or sustained investment in the capacities that made citizenship real.
The answers helped build the twentieth century.
Working project description · scope, title, and argument may evolve as the research continues.