Ball State African American Studies welcomes to campus Dr. Lorenzo Boyd, a nationally recognized leader in police-community relations and an authority on urban policing, diversity issues in criminal justice, race and crime, and criminal justice systems. On February 6 from 6-8pm in the Student Center Ballroom, Dr. Boyd will be joined by two prominent historians of African American history and policing, Drs. Simon Balto and Max Felker Kantor, for “Race and Police: Historical and Contemporary Issues of Policing Brown and Black Communities.” We hope you will join us for this event, which is free and open to the public.
Lorenzo M. Boyd, Ph.D., is a nationally recognized leader in police-community relations and an authority on urban policing, diversity issues in criminal justice, race and crime, and criminal justice systems. A former president of the Academy of Criminal Justice Science and a life member of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE), Dr. Boyd has appeared on local, regional, and national media outlets to discuss policing in the aftermath of high-profile cases, including shootings in Baton Rouge, Dallas, and Ferguson, Missouri. In 2019, he led a study addressing issues of racism, bias, and police and community relations at Yale University after a white graduate student called the police to report a black graduate student who was asleep in a residence hall common room. Dr. Boyd currently serves as the University of New Haven’s assistant provost for diversity and inclusion.
Max Felker-Kantor is an American historian who specializes in twentieth century American and African American history with a focus on race, politics, and social movements. His first book, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), narrates the dynamic history of policing, anti–police abuse movements, race, and politics in Los Angeles from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. His articles and book chapters have been published in the Journal of Urban History, Journal of Civil and Human Rights, Boom California, Black and Brown Los Angeles: A Contemporary Reader, the Pacific Historical Review, and the Casden Annual Review. He teaches American and African American history at Ball State University.
Simon Balto teaches, researches, and writes about African American history in the United States. His first book, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), explores the development of a police system in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods that over the course of the mid-twentieth century became simultaneously brutally repressive and neglectful. His writing has also appeared in TIME magazine, The Washington Post, The Progressive, the Journal of African American History, Labor, and numerous other popular and scholarly outlets.
Presented by the Minor in African-American Studies & Sponsored by the College of Science and Humanities, English Department, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Cohen Peace Center, and Teacher’s College.