Education

Ph.D., Indiana University (2008)
B.A., Kenyon College (2001)

 

Biography

I specialize in the history of race and inequality, housing and real estate, and tax policy in the U.S., as well as the social and environmental history of beaches and coastlines in the U.S. I am the author of the books The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America, Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline, and The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South, and served as the Principal Investigator of a study of the History of African American Outdoor Recreation for the National Park Service. I teach courses on Race and Real Estate in the U.S., Local Politics in America, Urban History, and modern U.S. History, among others.

 

Publications

Books

The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America

Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America's Most Exclusive Shoreline

The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South

 

Studies

African American Outdoor Recreation: A National Historic Landmarks Theme Study

 

Articles

“From Commons to Capital: The Creative Destruction of Coastal Real Estate, Environments, and Communities in the US South,” Transatlantica, special issue “Places and Cultures of Capitalism,” 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.16278

“Capitalizing on the Urban Fiscal Crisis: Predatory Tax Buyers in 1970s Chicago,” Journal of Urban History, 44 (May 2018), 382-401

"Unconscionable: Tax Delinquency Sales as a Form of Dignity Taking," Chicago-Kent Law Review, 92 (2017), 905-35

“Investing in Distress: Tax Delinquency and Predatory Tax Buying in Urban America,” Critical Sociology, 43 (March 2017), 199-219

“The Power to Destroy: Property Tax Discrimination in Civil Rights-Era Mississippi,” Journal of Southern History, 82 (Aug. 2016), 579-616

“Fear of an Open Beach: Public Rights and Private Interests in 1970s Coastal Connecticut,” Journal of American History, 102 (Sept. 2015), 433-62

“The Sunbelt’s Sandy Foundation: Coastal Development and the Making of the Modern South,” Southern Cultures, 20 (Fall 2014), 24-42

“The ‘Negro Park’ Question: Land, Labor, and Leisure in Pitt County, North Carolina, 1920-1930,” Journal of Southern History, 79 (Feb. 2013), 113-42

“Sunbelt by the Sea: Governing Race and Nature in a Twentieth-Century Coastal Metropolis,” Journal of Urban History, 38 (May 2012), 488-508

“The Political Work of Leisure: Class, Recreation, and African American Commemoration at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, 1881–1931,” Journal of Social History, 42 (Oct. 2008), 57-77

“‘The Slightest Semblance of Unruliness’: Steamboat Excursions, Pleasure Resorts, and the Emergence of Segregation Culture on the Potomac River, 1890–1920,” Journal of American History, 94 (March 2008), 1108-36

 

Chapters in Edited Collections

“Enclosing the Coastal Commons: Beach Privatization and Social Inequality in the Twentieth-Century United States,” in Beach Politics: Social, Racial, and Environmental Injustice on the Shoreline, ed. Setha Low (New York University Press, 2025), 21-39

“Property and Power,” in After Emancipation: Racism and Resistance at the University of Virginia, ed. Kirt von Daacke and Andrea Douglas (University of Virginia Press, 2024), co-authored with Brian Cammeron 

"The Short End of Both Sticks: Property Assessments and Black Taxpayer Disadvantage in Urban America," in Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century, ed. Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams (University of Chicago Press, 2019), pp. 189-217

“Numbers and New Negroes at the Beach: At Work and Play Outside the Black Metropolis,” in Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem, ed. Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), pp. 335-60

 

Essays and Op-eds

“When Cities Partner With Predatory Financial Ghouls,” Jacobin, May 15, 2025

“Investing in Distress,” The American Prospect, April 26, 2024

“It’s Time to End the Quiet Cruelty of Property Taxes,” New York Times, April, 11, 2024

“Beaches Belong to Everyone, Not the Privileged Few,” New Haven Register, Feb. 17, 2021, https://www.nhregister.com/opinion/article/Opinion-Beaches-belong-to-everyone-not-the-15956762.php

"Who Will Get to Swim This Summer?," New York Times, June 28, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/opinion/coronavirus-openings-summer-beaches.html

“Cities Should End the Unjust Practice of Tax Sales,” City Lab, April 2, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-02/cities-should-end-the-unjust-practice-of-tax-sales

"Black People's Land Was Stolen," New York Times, June 22, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/opinion/sunday/reparations-hearing.html

“They Won’t Stop Until They Own It All,” PublicSeminar.org, Aug. 20, 2018, http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/08/they-wont-stop-until-they-own-it-all/

“Exclusive Beaches, Divided State,” Hartford Courant, July 1, 2018, https://www.courant.com/opinion/insight/hc-op-insight-kahrl-ct-divided-beaches20180626-story.html

“America’s Segregated Shores,” The Guardian, June 12, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/12/americas-segregated-shores-beaches-long-history-as-a-racial-battleground

“The North’s Jim Crow,” New York Times, May 28, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/27/opinion/jim-crow-north.html

"The Cost of Coastal Capitalism: How Greedy Developers Left Miami Ripe for Destruction," Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/09/12/the-co...

"Free the Beaches, Before It's Too Late," Washington Post, Aug. 3, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/08/03/free-t...

"Beaches Belong to the Public," New York Times, Dec. 5, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/opinion/beaches-belong-to-the-public.html

 

Awards and Honors

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow (Jan.-June 2022)

2013 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award (Organization of American Historians) For best book on the civil rights struggle from the beginnings of the nation to the present

Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies

Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University

Recent Doctoral Recipients Fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies

Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies

2007 Louis Pelzer Memorial Award (Organization of American Historians) For best essay by a candidate for a graduate degree on any topic or period in United States history

 

Courses Taught

Undergraduate

American History since 1865

From Redlined to Subprime: Race and Real Estate in the US

African American History, 1865-Present

All Politics Is Local

Black Metropolis: African Americans and the City

Land and Power in America

History of the Civil Rights Movement

Graduate

US Urban History

The United States, 1945-Present