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About Omari Averette-Phillips

Omari Averette-Phillips is a History Educator and an independent scholar based in Southern California. An African Americanist, his research focuses on Black engagement with political and labor organizations in the U.S. South during Reconstruction. His research explores the intersection of race, gender, politics, and labor.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a History educator and independent scholar based in Southern California. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

NBN Episodes hosted by Omari:

African American Studies December 3, 2023

Merze Tate

The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar

Barbara D. Savage

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex …
African American Studies July 29, 2023

Colorblind Tools

Global Technologies of Racial Power

Marzia Milazzo

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
In Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power (Northwestern UP, 2022), Marzia Milazzo offers a transnational account of anti-Blackness and white supremacy that pushes against the dominant emphasis on historical …
African American Studies July 15, 2023

The Fear of Too Much Justice

Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts

Stephen Bright and James Kwak

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
Glenn Ford, a Black man, spent thirty years on Louisiana’s death row for a crime he did not commit. He was released in 2014—and given twenty dollars—when prosecutors admitted they …
African American Studies July 2, 2023

Isaac Murphy

The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey

Katherine C. Mooney

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
Listen:
Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport …
African American Studies June 3, 2023

Workers of All Colors Unite

Race and the Origins of American Socialism

Lorenzo Costaguta

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
Listen:
As the United States transformed into an industrial superpower, American socialists faced the vexing question of how to approach race. Lorenzo Costaguta balances intellectual and institutional history to illuminate the …
African American Studies May 13, 2023

Black Queer Flesh

Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel

Alvin J. Henry

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel (U Minnesota Press, 2021) reinterprets key African American novels from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Modernism to contemporary literature, showing …
African American Studies May 4, 2023

After Black Lives Matter

Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle

Cedric Johnson

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
The historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd transformed the way Americans and the world think about race and policing. Why did it achieve so little …
African American Studies April 15, 2023

Of Black Study

Joshua Myers

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
Joshua Myers considers the work of thinkers who broke with the racial and colonial logic of academic disciplinarity and how the ideas of Black intellectuals created different ways of thinking …
African American Studies March 15, 2023

Samuel Ringgold Ward

A Life of Struggle

R. J. M. Blackett

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
Born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817–c. 1869) escaped enslavement and would become a leading figure in the struggle for Black freedom, citizenship, and equality. He …
African American Studies March 5, 2023

Violent Utopia

Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa

Jovan Scott Lewis

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
In Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke UP, 2022), Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration …
African American Studies February 27, 2023

Fear of a Black Republic

Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States

Leslie M. Alexander

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
The emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation lit a beacon of hope for Black people throughout the African diaspora. Leslie M. Alexander’s study reveals the untold story of …
African American Studies February 19, 2023

Race in the Crucible of War

African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam

Gerald F. Goodwin

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
When African American servicemen went to fight in the Vietnam War, discrimination and prejudice followed them. Even in a faraway country, their military experiences were shaped by the racial environment …
African American Studies February 10, 2023

Deflective Whiteness

Coopting Black and Latinx Identity Politics

Hannah Noel

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
In Deflective Whiteness: Coopting Black and Latinx Identity Politics (Ohio State UP, 2022), Hannah Noel repositions Whiteness studies in relation to current discussions around racialized animus and White victimhood, demonstrating …
African American Studies January 8, 2023

To Address You as My Friend

African Americans' Letters to Abraham Lincoln

Jonathan W. White

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
Many African Americans of the Civil War era felt a personal connection to Abraham Lincoln. For the first time in their lives, an occupant of the White House seemed concerned …
African American Studies December 18, 2022

Half American

The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad

Matthew F. Delmont

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units and …
African American Studies December 6, 2022

Bodies Out of Place

Theorizing Anti-Blackness in U.S. Society

Barbara Harris Combs

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
Bodies Out of Place: Theorizing Anti-Blackness in U.S. Society (U Georgia Press, 2022) asserts that anti-Black racism is not better than it used to be; it is just performed in …
African American Studies November 3, 2022

The Workings of Diaspora

Jamaican Maroons and the Claims to Sovereignty

Mario Nisbett

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
Engaging the past, the present, and the future, The Workings of Diaspora: Jamaican Maroons and the Claims to Sovereignty (Lexington Books, 2021) shows how the lived experience of Jamaican Maroons …
African American Studies September 22, 2022

The Silent Shore

The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State

Charles L. Chavis Jr.

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a twenty-three-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His gruesome murder was part of a …
African American Studies June 29, 2022

The Families' Civil War

Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice

Holly A. Pinheiro Jr.

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
The Families' Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice (U Georgia Press, 2022) tells the stories of freeborn northern African Americans in Philadelphia struggling to maintain families …
African American Studies June 14, 2022

Claiming Union Widowhood

Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South

Brandi Clay Brimmer

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
In Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South (Duke UP, 2020), Brandi Clay Brimmer analyzes the US pension system from the perspective of poor black women …
African American Studies June 6, 2022

A Brick and a Bible

Black Women's Radical Activism in the Midwest During the Great Depression

Melissa Ford

Hosted by Omari Averette-Phillips
In this first study of Black radicalism in midwestern cities before the civil rights movement, Melissa Ford connects the activism of Black women who championed justice during the Great Depression …