I write, document, and research Black community life in the rural U.S. South—to represent them Truly.
In my scholarship, I use ethnographic methods to understand how Black communities in the U.S. South respond to structural change around them, whether new local industries or broader shifts in regional governance and development.
In my documentary practice, I use oral history, archival methods, and film to build a visual record of contemporary cultural life in the rural South—memory practices, folklore, leisure, and the institutions communities build and sustain.
Across all my work, I attend to what Black life in the rural South reveals about race, memory, inequality, and the American story.
I have written two books: I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (2020) is an ethnography of blues tourism and Black knowledge systems in Clarksdale, Mississippi. It received two "best book" awards. Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight (2024) is a photo-essay collection made with photographer Richard Frishman.
I have also written and directed the three-part short film anthology We Do a Black South Way (with cinematographer Ethan Payne). The films have been screened and awarded at film festivals in the U.S. and abroad. They are based, in part, on oral accounts collected through The Black Volumes, a digital oral history archive I founded as part of my archival practice.
Image: Noah Stewart
What I'm up to now.
I am an associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, where I teach courses on race, place, popular culture, and qualitative research methods. From 2021 to 2026, I served as co-editor of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, the flagship journal for sociological research on race.
I am currently expanding The Black Volumes Digital Archive and writing a book about casino development in Mississippi.
Image: Christine Kreschollek
Back on the Record
I grew up in the rural Black South, surrounded by big fields, backroads, and what we would call—for reasons different from y’all—country people. And we grew up our country Black South way: loving our Grandmamas, working with our hands, football on Friday and church every Sunday. We were blues people, “makeshifting” (Thomas 2020) a life good enough for the world to sample from, whether they understood it or not.
By middle school, I was trying to write that world into poems and short stories. By high school, journals, raps, and church plays. By Macalester College and the University of Mississippi, class assignments. And by my 30th day of grad school at the University of North Carolina, I had realized that the world I had been writing—the one of country people living a Black South way—wasn’t studied all that much by the one I was headed toward. And that if I thought it should be, then I would need to be one of the ones studyin’ it.
That became my mission: to help put the rural Black South (back) on all the records. To represent its people—responsibly, truthfully, as I discuss elsewhere, Beautifully.
Five million Black Americans live in rural and small-town communities across the South (Center on Rural Innovation). They are descendants of, witnesses to, and participants in some of the most consequential transformations in U.S. history: chattel slavery, Reconstruction, migration, the Civil Rights Movement.
They are cultural workers, keeping traditions that sustained generations before them and that continue to ground Black racial identity and American culture.
They are Black Americans, building lives and communities while navigating a place I would call—for reasons different from y’all—a changing same: changing in some of the ways the rest of rural America is changing—depopulation, worsening poverty—and the same in the ways scholars call the “legacies” and “afterlives” of slavery, and the “blues epistemology.”
A Black South Way
Since 2014, I have been done fieldwork in and recording the stories of the rural Black South, primarily in the Delta and Hill Country regions of Mississippi. I Don’t Like the Blues focuses on Clarksdale, Mississippi, where for the last forty years blues tourism has helped ground the local economy, creating a contradiction Black residents know well: a cultural form they made and still love is being deployed in ways they have little say in, rarely benefit from materially, and therefore “don’t like.”
My other major works—the essays in Ghosts of Segregation and the films in We Do a Black South Way—turn to the histories, memories, and cultural practices through which Black communities in the rural South make and sustain social life across generations.