Episode 003: Writing About Your Own Family’s History with Blair L.M. Kelley and Kellie Carter Jackson
In the red clay fields of Georgia, a man named Solicitor rose before dawn to tend the land he did not own. He was a sharecropper, a laborer, and a father. His name was passed down along with stories of endurance and pride. Generations later, his great-granddaughter, Blair Kelley, would begin her book Black Folk with his story, grounding the history of the Black working class in the life of one man whose labor helped build a world.
Elsewhere in the United States, Kellie Carter Jackson was tracing her own family’s legacy, stories of resistance, of quiet defiance, of choosing dignity in the face of oppression. In We Refuse, she writes not just about protest marches and speeches, but about the everyday acts of refusal that shaped Black life and freedom.
For both historians, family history is more than inspiration. It is method. It is archive. It is truth-telling. Today, Blair Kelley and Kellie Carter Jackson join us to talk about how personal memory becomes political and social history.
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TODAY'S GUESTS
Blair L.M. Kelley is a historian of Black working-class life and the new president and director of the National Humanities Center. She is the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy V. Ferguson. Her latest book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class, blends personal and collective history.
Kellie Carter Jackson is the Michael and Denise Kellen ’68 Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. She studies the lived experiences of Black people with a focus on slavery, abolitionism, the Civil War, political violence, Black women’s history, and film. She is the author of the award-winning book, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence and most recently authored We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance.
SHOW NOTES
- Erica L. Ball and Kellie Carter Jackson, Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, and Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2017).
- W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 (Free Press, 1998).
- Kellie Carter Jackson, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
- Kellie Carter Jackson, "Ethel Phillips, Domestic Labor, and Employer Perceptions," WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 45 no. 3 and 4 (Fall/Winter 2017): 160-73.
- Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press, 2024).
- Kellie Carter Jackson, "'Just Ethel': What My Grandmother Who was Much More than a Domestic Worker, Taught me About Black Patriotism," WBUR
- Martha S. Jones, The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir (Basic Books, 2025).
- Blair L.M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
- Blair L.M. Kelley, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (Liveright, 2023).
- Toni Morrison, Beloved (Vintage, 2004).
- Mildred G. Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Puffin Books, 2001).
