Contested Memories: Freedom Work in Public History

Contested Memories: Freedom Work in Public History will be held on Thursday, October 2 at 6 p.m. at the Indiana Historical Society in downtown Indianapolis. Check-in begins at 5:30pm. Free, registration is encouraged. Join the Indiana Association of Historians and the Indiana Historical Society for the 2026 Thornbrough Lecture in African American History. Professor Nishani Frazier, Professor of History and Director of Public History at North Carolina State University, will discuss her breadth of work exploring the African American experience in the Midwest. Some of her latest work includes Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism and its accompanying website, which provides access to maps, archival documents, and oral interviews. Frazier has also been published in Black Perspectives, AMSJ Blog, TruthOut, and more. Check out Frazier’s work here: https://harambeecity.rrchnm.org/ In partnership with the Indiana Association of Historians Nishani Frazier is Professor of History and Director of Public History at North Carolina State University. Prior to North Carolina State University, she was a faculty member at Miami University of Ohio and the University of Kansas. Professor Frazier has also held professional public history positions as Associate Curator of African American History and Archives at Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS), Assistant to the Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Archives at the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and personal assistant for Dr. John Hope Franklin, before and during his tenure as chair of President Bill Clinton’s advisory board on “One America”. Nishani’s publication, Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism, was released with an accompanying website also titled Harambee City. Harambee City website is a digital project that creates a second layer of book “reading” via online access to maps, archival documents, teacher lesson plans, and oral history interviews. Frazier’s writings also include: co-editor for Freedom on My Mind: The Columbia Documentary History of the African American Experience (Columbia University Press, 2003); a policy paper for Democracy Collaborative “A ‘New Direction’: Community Wealth Building Black Community, Then and Now” Next System; co-authored essay, “Blackness is Not the Absence of Light: Restoring Black Visibility and Liberation of Digital Humanities in Debates in Digital Humanities; and multiple publications in Black Perspectives, AMSJ Blog, TruthOut, and more. Professor Frazier is currently working on a tasty new book titled Cooking With Black Nationalism.