Yevette Richards, Associate Professor, History and Art History, received funding to write a book about northern Louisiana.
The book will be a regional study of how kinship networks were central to the production of systemic racist terror and the subsequent erasure of its memory.
Richards will investigate a broad spectrum of racist violence from Reconstruction to the 1940s. She will show how white family networks functioned over time and across multiple parishes to serve as both incubators of racist violence and shields of protection for the perpetrators within.
Richards began this project as an investigation into two unique and interconnected lynching cases within her family network. She holds that previous scholarship has not sufficiently explored the community ties and intimate relationships between victims and perpetrators, much less the multi-generational effects of racist violence and the lies told about it. She began this project to fill that gap.
Regarding her hopes for the project, Richards said, "I hope that this book project will contribute to conversations at community, state, and national levels about how hidden histories function to distort knowledge of the past, perpetuate inequalities in the present, and undermine the will to create just policies for the future."
Richards received $60,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for this project. Funding began in Jan. 2023 and will end in Dec. 2023.
###
About George Mason University
George Mason University is Virginia's largest public research university. Located near Washington, D.C., Mason enrolls 38,000 students from 130 countries and all 50 states. Mason has grown rapidly over the last half-century and is recognized for its innovation and entrepreneurship, remarkable diversity and commitment to accessibility. Learn more at http://www.gmu.edu.