Published in 2017 by Harvard University Press, Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago is the first full-scale project to frame the Great Migration as a fundamentally environmental experience for African Americans. It reveals that, to an extent hitherto largely unrecognized, not only should African Americans be central to narratives of environment and place in the early twentieth century, but that natural and landscaped environments are central to African American culture. I demonstrate how the interconnections of race and place – African Americans’ deep and fraught connections with American soil – are integral to an understanding of the emergence of both African American and American modernity in the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on Chicago during the interwar period, my project uses environmental history and criticism to go beyond an environmental justice perspective and re-center the story of black modernity around material and imaginative interactions with place. Rather than locate African Americans in conversation with environmentalism as a political movement, then, I analyze a wide variety of cultural texts to reveal African Americans’ critical connections to natural and landscaped environments.

Current Project: For my next research project, I plan to historicize the stubbornly persistent split between the environmental justice and “mainstream” environmental movements—a split that in many ways continues to hobble activists’ efforts to address key environmental problems. Although scholars have explored several aspects of this critical divide, no historian has yet fully examined its origins in the 1960s and 1970s. In a field still dominated by a sociological perspective, this will be the first historical study to show how the “mainstream” environmental movement, concerned in large part with abating pollution’s negative effects on both humans and ecosystems, eventually spurned minority communities who shared many of the same concerns about pollution’s impacts on human health. Although collaboration between mostly white “mainstream” environmentalists and minorities seemed briefly possible, I argue that such an alliance was ultimately doomed not only by environmentalist rhetoric and legislation that largely ignored people of color, but also by the coincident end of the Civil Rights Movement’s legislative victories and the rise of a more radical and transnational race consciousness. With their interests not represented by the “mainstream” movement, racial minorities’ environmental concerns thus coalesced in the environmental justice movement in the early 1980s. Based on preliminary graduate research as well as my experience teaching a course on African American environmental history, this next book will include chapters on the environmental resonance of the post-World War II urban crisis in America, the Black Panthers’ global environmental consciousness, the first Earth Day in 1970, and the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972.