My interests as a historian are directly related to growing up in the deep South during the turbulent years of the Civil Rights Movement. Watching with horror as my hometown—Birmingham—seethed then exploded with racial tension, I experienced a deep need to understand. Hence my research and the classes I teach explore the Constitutional and racial issues of American history. My first book, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871-1872, grapples with the problems of Reconstruction in South Carolina and the failure of the U.S. Government under the 14th and 15th Amendments to sustain a rule of law strong enough to protect the former slaves as citizens. I am currently completing a book that examines the federal government’s ongoing efforts to protect African American voting rights after the formal end of Reconstruction in 1877.

Select Publications

Introduction to Bitter Freedom: William Stone’s Record of Service in the Freedmen’s Bureau. University of South Carolina Press, 2008 .

The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871-1872. University of Georgia Press, 1996.

“The Ellenton Riot Case and Federal Enforcement of Black Rights in post-Redemption South Carolina,” in Donald G. Nieman and Christopher Waldrep, Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1800-1900. University of Georgia Press, 2000.

“The South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials and Enforcement of Federal Rights, 1871-1872.” Civil War History 39 (March 1993).

Courses Taught

HIST 554: Southern History
HIST 555: American Constitutional History
HIST 556: Bill of Rights in American History
HIST 533: Gilded Age
HIST 586: Advanced Undergraduate Seminar
HIST 908: Nineteenth Century United States
HIST 984: Topics in Southern History
HIST 984: Topics in American Constitutional History