Collaborators

Sally Gordon is the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is co-director with Kevin Waite of The Long Road to Freedom collaborative project, funded by a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded in 2019 and supported by the University of Pennsylvania. Their first public lecture based on their work together was part of the Huntington Library Centennial Lecture Series and was delivered at the Huntington in Pasadena in January 2020.

Gordon is known for her work on law and religion in American public life, and the history of religious liberty. She has appeared in documentaries, the Daily Show, podcasts, radio talk shows, and public lectures. Her popular writing has been published in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Salt Lake Tribune and the New York Times. Her current book project, titled Freedom’s Holy Light:  Disestablishment in American 1776-1876, explores deep and abiding questions of religion and justice, especially in connection to race, slavery, and economic and political life. In 2020-21, she is a Member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study. She was President of the American Society for Legal History from 2017 to 2019, and serves as co-editor of Studies in Legal History, the book series of the Society.  Her scholarly work has appeared in the Journal of American History, the William & Mary Quarterly, the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of the Early Republic, and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, among others. She is the recipient of several teaching prizes. Her first two books are The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth- Century America (Univ. of North Carolina, 2002) and The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Harvard, 2010).

Los Angeles native Jackie Broxton serves as the Executive Director of the Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation. The foundation is a public benefit 501(c) (3) organization that is an outreach ministry of First AME Church of Los Angeles.
The mission of the foundation is to provide services and support for current and former foster youth as well as bring greater public awareness to the life and legacy of Biddy Mason. Currently the foundation hosts events designed to meet the specific needs of current and former foster youth. Annually the foundation awards academic scholarships to current and former foster youth.

I’m completing a manuscript, “The African American Church and Civic Engagement in L.A.: 1900-1950.” In 1900 L.A. was a market town of 100,000 residents, 2000 of whom were African Americans. By 1950, the population of Los Angeles had grown to over one and a half million people, of whom 170,000 were African Americans. At the onset of the twentieth century, W.E.B. DuBois emphasized the importance of the African American in the civic life of the community

“Consequently all movements for social betterment are apt to centre in the church . . .the minister often acts as an employment agent; considerable charitable and reericanlief work is done . . . the race problem in all of its phases is continually being discussed . . . “

Philadelphia Negro, p. 207.

My work examines the role of eight African American churches in the civic and public life of Los Angeles: First A.M.E. Church (1872), The Second Baptist Church (1885), Wesley Chapel (1888), Westminster Presbyterian Church, (1904), the New Hope Baptist Church (1907), St.
Philips Episcopal Church (1907), Lincoln Memorial Congregational Church (1912), and the People’s Independent Church of Christ (1915).

The purpose of this study is to examine these eight churches in the public square. Four church based/secular organizations allow me to tell the story of L.A. ‘s African American churches on the larger community: The Forum, 1903-1942, a civic society that was the forum for the African American community to express its opinions on issues of the day; The Good Samaritan Benevolent Society, a social service agency run by and for members of Second Baptist Church from 1906-1967; the L.A. Branch of the NAACP, 1913-present; and the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, 1925. The Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company has deep roots in the People’s Independent Church of Christ.

What allows me to tell this story are the archival materials from these various churches. I am the first scholar to gain access to the archives of the Second Baptist Church, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, and the People’s Independent Church of Christ. In addition, I conducted interviews/oral histories with 63 people who were affiliated with one of these churches before 1950. The oral histories and first time archival materials give me a unique perspective.

Kevin Waite is an assistant professor of history at Durham University in England and the author of West of Slavery: The Transcontinental Crisis of the Civil War Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). His scholarly articles and chapters have appeared in the Journal of the Civil War Era, California History, the Cambridge History of the American Civil War, and the Oxford Handbook on Reconstruction. Kevin also writes regularly for popular media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, the New Republic, TIME, and the Washington Post.

Rev. JL Armstrong is an Associate Minister at First African Methodist Episcopal Church (F.A.M.E.), the oldest African American church in Los Angeles. Rev. Armstrong began his ministry under the leadership of Rev. Dr. Cecil L. “Chip” Murray, Senior Minister in 1990 and continues under the leadership of Rev. J. Edgar Boyd.

Rev. Armstrong became a student minister at F.A.M.E. in February 1990. In April of that year, he was appointed chairperson of Dr. Murray’s Rites of Passage Man Child Program which targeted young African American males ages 9 through 18.

In 1992, Rev. Armstrong was ordained an Itinerant Deacon, ordained an Itinerant Elder in 1994, and shortly thereafter was appointed Minister of Stewardship responsible for increasing church giving. He served as ministerial liaison for the “Walk of F.A.M.E.” $500,000 fundraiser benefiting the Cecil L. Murray Education Center in 1997, co-chaired the “F.A.M.E. Family Day” fundraiser for several years and was appointed Minister of Emergency Preparedness in 2008, and chaired a $300,000 church fundraiser in 2014.

‘In addition to Rev. Armstrong’s ministerial duties, he had a distinguished twenty-five year career with Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., Inc. (Toyota), until it relocated from Torrance, California to Plano, Texas in 2018. Rev. Armstrong had numerous senior management responsibilities as National Manager Corporate Affairs with the responsibility for a multi-million dollar in-house video production center, the Toyota USA Automobile Museum, and oversight responsibility for national environmental education and STEM education community outreach programs for Toyota Community Relations. He also served as a community ambassador for Toyota and external affairs advisor to executive management. In addition, he was appointed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2005 to the Board of Directors for the National Environmental Education Foundation, headquartered in Washington, D.C., and became its Vice Chairman in 2006.

Prior to Toyota, Rev. Armstrong worked as Director of Business Affairs at Universal Television, MCA, Inc. negotiating deals for the services of writers, directors, and producers in connection with television development and production.

Rev. Armstrong earned a Bachelor of Science degree in business from Indiana University. He is past Vice Chair, External Affairs of the Southern California Minority Supplier Development Council Board of Directors, and served on the Senior Corporate Executive Advisory Board of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C. and is on the advisory board of the Team Heal Foundation in Los Angeles, California.

Francis Russo is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Pennsylvania whose research interests range broadly across the history of early America.

Paul Spitzzeri is the Museum Director at the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, where he has worked since 1988.  He has a B. A. and M. A. in History from California State University, Fullerton and has written on California history for such journals as California History, Southern California Quarterly, California Legal History and Journal of the West, and in the anthologies Law in the Western United States, Encyclopedia of Immigration and Migration in the American West, and Icons of the American West.   His biography on the Workman and Temple families is an Award of Merit winner from the American Association for State and Local History. 

Arielle Xena Alterwaite is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies slavery and freedom in the Atlantic world. She is currently working on a dissertation on the 1825 Haitian Indemnity debt, focusing on its international significance for imperialism, abolition, and finance.

Mia Bay is the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural, and social history.  Her recent work has focused on black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation in America.  Her books include The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford University Pres, 2000); To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009); and Traveling Black: A Social History of Segregated Transportation (forthcoming, Harvard University Press).  She is also the co-author of a leading textbook on African-American history and the co-editor of two volumes of collected essays on the intellectual lives of Black women and race and consumption in America.  Her work has been widely recognized and supported by leading scholarly organizations and foundations.

Bay is also a frequent consultant on museum and documentary film projects.  Her public history work includes the exhibit “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation, 1876-1968,” an inaugural project of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, where she also advises the museum’s Civil Rights History Project. She also serves as a scholarly advisor to the Library of Congress, and is on the boards of the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives Blog and the Journal of African American History, among others.

Mary Frances Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is the author of more than a dozen books, including History Teaches Us to Resist: Ho Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times (Beacon Press, 2018) and Five Dollars and A Pork Chop Sandwich: Vote Buying and the Corruption of Democracy (Beacon Press, 2016), and We Are Who We Say We Are: A Black Family’s Search for Home across the Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Berry has had a distinguished career in public service, including almost a quarter century as a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights with almost half that time as chair of the commission.  She also served as the Assistant Secretary for Education in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Carter administration.  Her activism has also earned her widespread recognition. She has received many awards and honorary degrees from universities and scholarly organizations, as well as the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  In 2013, she received the Nelson Mandela Award from the South African government, for her leading role in organizing the anti-apartheid Free South Africa Movement.

Berry also served as the Chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Provost of the University of Maryland.

Tyree Boyd-Pates is currently the Associate Curator Of Western History of The Autry Museum of the American West. Previously, Boyd-Pates was at the California African American Museum (CAAM) to curate exhibitions and public programs about the history of African Americans in California and the West.

During his time at CAAM, he organized several acclaimed exhibitions, including Cross Colours: Black Fashion in the 20th Century (2019), Making Mammy: A Caricature of Black Womanhood, 1840– 1940 (2019), How Sweet the Sound: Gospel Music in Los Angeles (2018), California Bound: Slavery on the New Frontier, 1848-1865 (2018), Los Angeles Freedom Rally, 1963 (2018), Center Stage: African American Women in Silent Race Films (2017) and No Justice, No Peace: LA 92 (2017),.

Before joining CAAM, Boyd-Pates was a professor of African American Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills, wherein 2016 he was named the Herb Carter and Yvonne Brathwaite-Burke Distinguished Lecturer. He has also been honored by the Empowerment Congress as one of Los Angeles’ 40 Emerging Civic Leaders and received the MLK Jr. Unsung Hero Award from the California Legislative Black Caucus and the Rising Runner Alumni Award from California State University, Bakersfield. Boyd-Pates is a national board member for Museum Hue and a member of the African American Intellectual History Society. He is a social media influencer on African American history and culture, especially noted for examining those subjects from a millennial perspective. Boyd-Pates holds an MA in African American Studies from Temple University and a BA in Communications/Public Relations with a minor in African American Studies from California State University, Bakersfield.

After receiving her BA from UCSB, Patty Colman earned two MA degrees from UCLA and CSUN. She worked as a contract historian for the National Park Service, specializing in cultural resource management and homestead history. She served as the editor of the Journal of Ventura County History for two years and is now Professor of History at Moorpark College. Her article on the 19th century African American community of Los Angeles can be found in the Southern California Quarterly (2012) and she has contributed to numerous projects regarding African American history in Los Angeles. Recently, her research has focused on women homesteaders in the Santa Monica Mountains and she is currently working on an article that examines homestead law and gender.

William Deverell is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.  An historian of the 19th and 20th century American West, he has written on the environmental, political, and ethnic history of the region.  He is currently at work on an augmented reality project designed to recover the last spaces, places, and people of the first Chinatown in Los Angeles, destroyed in the 1930s to make way for Union Station.  He studied at Stanford and received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in History from Princeton.

As an architectural historian, Laura Voisin George has done field survey and research across the U.S., particularly in the Southern states. She brings on-the-ground experience of these areas and communities to her studies of the transmission of cultural values during the nation’s westward expansion of the nineteenth century, and their influence on her native Southern California. Laura has moderated panels on slavery research at Virginia Forum conferences, and served as the program co-chair for the 2013 “Telling the History of Slavery” conference at Monticello, in conjunction with the “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty” exhibition at the National Museum of American History.

Laura’s University of California, Santa Barbara dissertation focuses on John Strother Griffin, a native of Virginia and part of an extended family of elite slaveholders. As an assistant surgeon with the U.S Army of the West during the Mexican-American War, Griffin came to California with an enslaved bodyservant from his childhood. Yet when Biddy Mason was declared free forever, Griffin offered her first job as a nurse and midwife, beginning their longterm collaboration in Los Angeles’ transition to an American city.

VanJessica Gladney is a first-year graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in History at the University of Pennsylvania. She serves as the Clío Co-President, Co-President of the William Fontaine Fellowship Society and the Digital Historian for the Penn & Slavery Project. Her interests involve tracing the spread of pro-slavery legislation throughout the “free” states in the mid-nineteenth-century.

Margaret Jerrido has been the archivist at Mother Bethel AME Church since 2008. Previously she was the Archivist and Director of the Urban Archives, in the Temple University Libraries. Ms. Jerrido has conducted workshops on how to preserve all formats of historical materials, planned workshops and lead discussion groups on forming an archives. She has consulted with various repositories, community groups and church historical ministries throughout Philadelphia on how to establish and maintain an archives.

She is currently working on gathering historical data to assist researchers and genealogists on finding, in particular, birth and death dates about African Americans during the late 19th to the late 20th centuries.

Daniel Lynch is a teacher of history and social science at Marlborough School, a secondary independent girls school in Los Angeles. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles and is currently writing a book on the intersection of masculinity, race and politics in nineteenth-century Southern California. In his research and his teaching, Lynch is always looking for opportunities to connect the diverse stories of greater Los Angeles to larger historical themes.

Michael F. Magliari is a Professor of History at California State University, Chico, where he has taught since 1990. A lifelong Californian, Magliari earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, in 1992. In addition to previous articles on California Populism and late nineteenth century agrarian politics, Magliari is the co-author (with Michael J. Gillis) of John Bidwell and California: The Life and Writings of a Pioneer, 1841-1900 (Spokane, WA: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 2003), and a co-author of the new fifth edition of The Elusive Eden: A New History of California (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2020). A former National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow who has also held research fellowships at the Henry Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and at the Hubert Howe Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, Magliari’s current work focuses on Native American slavery in the mid nineteenth century American West. He has, to date, published the following three California case studies of Indian slavery: “Free Soil, Unfree Labor: Cave Johnson Couts and the Binding of Indian Workers in California, 1850-1867,” Pacific Historical Review 73 (August 2004), 349-389; “Free State Slavery: Bound Indian Labor and Slave Trafficking in California’s Sacramento Valley, 1850-1864,” Pacific Historical Review 81 (May 2012), 155-192; and “Masters, Apprentices, and Kidnappers: Indian Servitude and Slave Trafficking in Humboldt County, California, 1860-1863,” California History 97 (Summer 2020), 2-26.

Quincy D. Newell is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College. She is an expert on the religious history of the American West and has published extensively in that field. She has also become a leader in Mormon Studies, focusing on race in the nineteenth-century Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her most recent book, Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Newell is also the co-editor of the Mormon Studies Review.

Som-Mai Nguyen is a J.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems.

W. Paul Reeve is Simmons Professor of Mormon Studies in the History Department at the University of Utah where he teaches courses on Utah history, Mormon history, and the history of the U.S. West. His book, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness, (Oxford, 2015) received three best book awards. In 2016, the Utah Council for the Social Studies named Professor Reeve its University Teacher of the Year. He is project manager and general editor of Century of Black Mormons, a digital history database designed to name and identify all known black Mormons baptized into the faith between 1830 and 1930. The database is now live at http://CenturyofBlackMormons.org .

Stacey Smith is an Associate Professor of History at Oregon State University where she specializes in the history of the American West and the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. She is the author of Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 2013), which won the inaugural David Montgomery Prize in U.S. labor history from the Organization of American Historians and the Labor and Working-Class History Association. She is currently associate editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era and is working on a book on African American abolitionists and civil rights activists in the Pacific West entitled An Empire for Freedom.

Amy Tanner Thiriot is the author of Slavery in Zion: A Documentary and Genealogical History of Black Lives and Black Servitude in Utah Territory, 1847–1862 (forthcoming, University of Utah Press). She is an adjunct instructor in the BYU-Idaho Family History Research program and a graduate student in Family and Local History at the University of Dundee.

Mark Kelly Tyler is a native of Oakland, CA. He is an ordained itinerant elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

He is a graduate of Clark Atlanta University (B.A., Religion), Payne Theological Seminary (Masters of Divinity), and the University of Dayton (Ph.D., Educational Leadership).

Dr. Tyler is a documentary film maker. He has produced several projects, including Bishop Richard Allen: Apostle of Freedom (The Documentary), The Anvil: Echoes from the General Conference, The Anvil: The Spirit of African Methodism, and The Anvil: Preaching on the Frontline. He has been on air in other documentaries, including Dr. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates’ PBS documentary, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.

Dr. Tyler has also been active in the world of theological education, currently serving as a Fully Affiliated Faculty Member at the Methodist Theological Seminary in Ohio. He has been a member of the Adjunct Faculty at Payne Theological Seminary (PTS), Northeastern Seminary (NES), New Brunswick Theological Seminary (NBTS), and Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia (LTSP). Additionally, Dr. Tyler is the past Director of Church Relations and Alumni Affairs at PTS and the past Director of Church Vocations at NBTS.

Dr. Tyler’s ministry has also led him into the work of organizing for social justice. As a member of POWER (Philadelphians Organized to Witness, Empower, and Rebuild), he is the past Co-Chair of both the Board of Directors and the the Clergy Caucus. He is currently the Co-Director of POWER Live Free Campaign. POWER is a member of Faith in Action, formerly the PICO Network.

Dr. Tyler is the Co-Host of “The POWER Hour” on WURD Radio in Philadelphia, along with Bishop Dwayne Royster. The show airs Monday through Friday mornings at 6 AM and discusses news of the day through the lens of social justice. As a radio host, Dr. Tyler has had the opportunity to interview some of the most influential persons in our country.