This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Walter Greason, who teaches in the Department of History at Macalester College. In addition to a number of scholarly and public facing publications, projects such as The Racial Violence Syllabus, The T. Thomas Fortune Center, and The Wakanda Syllabus, he is the author of a number of groundbreaking works, including The Path to Freedom: Black Families in New Jersey (2010), Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey (2012), and most recently, in collaboration with Tim Fielder, The Graphic History of Hip Hop (2024). Across this conversation, we discuss the relation between historical research and Black Studies work, the political significance of the study of Black life, and the intersections of teaching, writing, and direct action aimed at racial justice.