Jay Winston Driskell Jr.

My work explores the relationship between race, gender and the forging of effective political solidarities in struggles for power within the urbanizing, segregating South. My first book, Schooling Jim Crow: the Fight for Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics (University Press of Virginia, 2014), traces the changes in black political consciousness that transformed a reactionary politics of respectability into a militant force for change during the fight for black public schools in Atlanta, Georgia.

My next book, tentatively entitled Lessons of the Fever: Disease, Development and Disfranchisement in the New South City, will explain how the language of disease and public health shaped the terms of political contestation in Gilded Age Jacksonville, Florida. Confronted with repeated epidemics of yellow fever, southern sanitarians linked the construction of the modern sanitary city to the disfranchisement of African Americans. Lessons will explain how the golden era of public health also became the years in which Jim Crow began its strange career.

To learn more about me and my work, please visit www.jaydriskell.com.