Faculty Interview - Patrick D. Jones
Department of History
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06/03/2019
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This is an interview with Prof. Patrick D. Jones
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- [00:00:04.520]I am Dr. Patrick Jones.
- [00:00:06.630]I am an Associate Professor in the Department of History,
- [00:00:09.810]and what we call the Institute for Ethnic Studies
- [00:00:12.260]here at UNL.
- [00:00:13.700]I'm in the African and African-American studies program
- [00:00:16.481]at the institute.
- [00:00:18.750]And I live in Omaha.
- [00:00:21.470]That's one of the unique aspects of my life.
- [00:00:28.474]I do modern U.S. history and political history in particular
- [00:00:34.710]and in the broadest sense, what I'm interested is
- [00:00:38.420]in the intersections of formal politics,
- [00:00:41.430]institutional politics, on the one hand,
- [00:00:43.860]with informal politics.
- [00:00:45.840]So protest politics, social movement politics,
- [00:00:48.990]the kinds of politics that happen outside
- [00:00:51.560]of formal institutional workings, and cultural politics,
- [00:00:56.220]so the ways that formal, informal,
- [00:00:57.930]and cultural politics intersect to make social change.
- [00:01:03.380]So the big question I'm interested in that connects
- [00:01:07.200]with all of my work really is how social change,
- [00:01:11.090]meaningful and lasting social change happens.
- [00:01:20.280]My first book was, it's called The Selma of The North,
- [00:01:23.040]and it focuses on the Civil Rights struggle
- [00:01:26.370]in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
- [00:01:29.620]There was a powerful movement from the late 1950s
- [00:01:34.060]through the mid-1970s in Milwaukee, as there were
- [00:01:37.030]in cities across the Urban North and Midwest and West.
- [00:01:41.800]This provided me the opportunity to do a kind of case study
- [00:01:45.970]on the northern movement.
- [00:01:47.270]I didn't have a lot of models for my work
- [00:01:50.120]when I was a graduate student.
- [00:01:51.230]This came out of my graduate work, my dissertation work.
- [00:01:55.140]Most scholars that looked at the Urban North
- [00:01:56.910]and race relations looked at ghettoization
- [00:01:59.320]and issues like that.
- [00:02:00.950]There weren't a lot of movement scholars
- [00:02:02.500]looking at struggles for racial justice
- [00:02:04.820]outside of the South.
- [00:02:06.150]So it gave me that opportunity to look at one place
- [00:02:10.350]and to see the dynamics of Civil Rights
- [00:02:12.640]and Black Power Era there.
- [00:02:14.230]And then Milwaukee has a significant role, not only locally,
- [00:02:17.610]but nationally in that the open housing campaign there,
- [00:02:20.900]that stretched from mid-1967 into mid-1968
- [00:02:27.640]really played a central catalytic roll in passage
- [00:02:31.160]of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which as I call it,
- [00:02:34.630]is the kind of forgotten Civil Rights Act of the 1960s.
- [00:02:38.050]And so just like Birmingham played a catalytic role
- [00:02:41.410]in spurring passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
- [00:02:45.280]and the Selma voting rights campaign played a catalytic role
- [00:02:48.510]in helping spur passage of the 1965 voting rights act,
- [00:02:52.540]the open housing campaign in Milwaukee similarly
- [00:02:56.080]played a catalytic roll in helping gain passage
- [00:02:59.080]of that Civil Rights act of Fair Housing Act of 1968.
- [00:03:04.390]All kinds of interesting dynamics come to the fore
- [00:03:08.090]when you look at movements
- [00:03:09.090]outside of the North and so,
- [00:03:11.740]about black power, about gender, within the movement,
- [00:03:15.990]about tactics and strategy, about the ways that struggles
- [00:03:20.300]for racial justice don't merely and only take the form
- [00:03:26.090]of marches and demonstrations, but take a whole lot
- [00:03:29.770]of other forms as well.
- [00:03:32.800]And so I'm interested in continuing to tell these kinds
- [00:03:36.730]of local stories in the Urban North.
- [00:03:38.500]I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, so my current project,
- [00:03:41.650]book project, focuses on contested meanings of black power
- [00:03:46.230]in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio.
- [00:03:49.020]And I look at again, everything from formal politics
- [00:03:51.920]to social movement politics,
- [00:03:54.340]to radical black power politics
- [00:03:56.870]and the cultural politics of race in the post-1945 era.
- [00:04:02.830]So again, mainly the 1950s, '60s, and 1970s.
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