Traci Parker
Visiting Scholar in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History
A historian of African Americans, Traci Parker specializes in civil rights, labor, gender, sexuality, and family. Her first book, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2019. It examines African Americans’ movement to dismantle racially discriminatory labor and customer service practices in department stores and illustrates how this movement shaped modern Black class identities and the politics of the twentieth-century black freedom struggle. Parker also is the co-editor of The New Civil Rights Movement Reader: Resistance, Resilience and Justice (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023). The reader moves from the 1930s through Black Lives Matter protests of today and addresses key topics including youth activism, regional and local freedom struggles, voting rights, economic inequality, gender, sexuality, and culture, and the movement’s global reach.
While at the Warren Center, Parker will work on her book manuscript tentatively titled, Beyond Loving: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Black Freedom Movement. Beyond Loving examines romantic relationships in and their importance to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.
Her research has been generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Stanford Humanities Center, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute/Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.