Research

Using a qualitative historical methodology, this inquiry draws upon archival research and oral histories to construct a narrative of the department’s founding, early curriculum, faculty leadership, student activism, and institutional challenges. Archival sources include university records, departmental documents, and contemporaneous publications, while oral histories center the voices of faculty, students, and community members who shaped and sustained the program. By privileging lived experience alongside institutional records, this study challenges traditional historiographies that marginalize Black intellectual labor. Ultimately, this dissertation contributes to Black Studies scholarship by documenting an underexamined institutional history and affirming Pan-African Studies as a transformative, community-rooted project central to the ongoing struggle for educational and cultural liberation.

The study begins with a qualitative phase using Sankofa circles, an African-centered dialogic method, to engage Black students in reflective conversations about where and how they learn history, whose histories are validated in school, and how they navigate tensions between school-based narratives and community knowledge. Insights from these Sankofa circles inform the development of the second, analytic phase, which examines the relationship between student experiences and the official curriculum through analysis of the California History–Social Studies Standards, the History–Social Studies Framework, district-adopted U.S. history textbooks, and educators’ instructional practices. By sequencing African-centered qualitative inquiry before curriculum analysis, the study intentionally centers Black student voice and epistemology as foundational rather than supplementary. This research contributes to Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, and social studies education scholarship by demonstrating how curriculum functions as a racialized structure and by offering African-centered methodological possibilities for studying Black students’ historical understanding, belonging, and critical consciousness.

Using extensive archival research across state, municipal, organizational, and personal collections, this dissertation analyzes how Black Germans were rendered visible and invisible through racialized statistics, government policy, and public discourse, while simultaneously producing alternative forms of visibility through community organizing, cultural production, and transnational encounters. The study traces how colonialism, empire, Nazism, postwar occupation, migration, and global Black liberation movements shaped Black German experiences and political consciousness. Across eight chapters, the dissertation examines state surveillance and categorization, Afro-German activism, relationships with African American soldiers and intellectuals, and the influence of Pan-African and Black internationalist movements. By foregrounding Black German voices and networks, this project contributes to African diaspora studies, German history, and Black European scholarship, demonstrating how Black Germans actively contested racial exclusion and articulated visions of belonging, dignity, and freedom across shifting political regimes.

Drawing on public health campaigns, medical journals, government reports, reform organization records, and community-based sources, the article demonstrates how national public health initiatives were deeply embedded in white supremacist logics that defined which populations were worthy of protection, investment, and care. While white middle-class motherhood was increasingly framed as essential to national vitality and supported through medical supervision and state resources, the reproductive lives of women of color were surveilled, disciplined, or neglected. Black women’s breastfeeding practices were shaped by the afterlives of enslavement, coerced labor, and racialized poverty; Indigenous women faced assimilationist public health interventions designed to disrupt maternal and community knowledge; and other women of color encountered medical regimes that pathologized their bodies while ignoring the structural conditions that constrained reproductive autonomy. Through a reproductive justice lens, the article reveals how access to the conditions necessary for breastfeeding—time, nutrition, bodily autonomy, and safety—was systematically denied along racial lines.

At the same time, this study foregrounds women of color’s agency, embodied knowledge, and resistance, highlighting breastfeeding as a practice sustained through intergenerational wisdom and community care networks despite the violence of white supremacist public health regimes. By situating breastfeeding within the framework of reproductive justice—which insists on the right to bodily autonomy, to have and not have children, and to parent children in safe and supportive environments—this article argues that infant feeding was a central site of racial governance within U.S. national public health. Ultimately, the article contributes to Black Studies, women’s history, and the history of medicine by demonstrating that national public health was not race-neutral, but rather a project that relied upon the regulation and exploitation of women of color’s reproductive labor in the pursuit of national strength.