Sowande’ Mustakeem, assistant professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis discusses the role of race and gender in a late nineteenth-century murder case. Mustakeem's presentation covers the death of Effie Jackson, a Kansas City woman killed by a rival for the affections of a man; Jackson’s case will serve as a basis to explore laws and institutions designed to police working-class African Americans.
About the Presenter
Sowande’ Mustakeem
Dr. Sowande’ Mustakeem is jointly appointed in the departments of history and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her bachelor's degree in African Studies from Elon College in North Carolina. She completed her master's degree in African and African-American Studies at Ohio State University and she earned her Ph.D. in comparative black history at Michigan State University. Her research includes middle passage studies, Atlantic world slavery, black women's history, gender, violence, history, criminality and policing, the social history of medicine and studies of the black Atlantic and African diaspora. She has published several scholarly articles and book chapters and has received a host of national fellowships for her earlier research, which traces the gendered history of slavery and the slave trade. This work is publicly available in her 2016 book, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage, which was published with the University of Illinois Press.