Journal Of Civil And Human Rights At Sonoma State University

Press release from Sonoma State University:

January 25, 2021

Nearly a decade ago, Michael Ezra, Professor of American Multicultural Studies at Sonoma State University, wondered why there wasn’t an academic journal devoted to scholarship on the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement and related freedom struggles.

Dr. Ezra, who had written and published on various aspects of the civil rights movement for years, including Civil Rights Movement: People and Perspectives (2009) and Muhammad Ali: The Making of an Icon (2009), felt that the growing community of talented scholars focused on the civil rights era, a subset of the broader field of African American Studies, was large enough to support a journal. He pitched the idea to several well-known scholars, including Clayborne Carson, then head of the Martin Luther King Center at Stanford (and editor of the King papers), and Peniel Joseph, the historian of Black Power who is now founding director of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs’ Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas, who then pitched it to others.

Soon Dr. Ezra had assembled enough scholars to form a first-rate editorial board with a diverse mix of mid-career scholars who could inform the journal’s decision-making as well as much of its peer review duties. Early on in the discussions, Dr. Carson suggested that the journal’s scope be expanded and suggested retitling it to the Journal of Civil and Human Rights, which was immediately adopted. Expansion of the journal’s scope, in turn, expanded the journal’s board to include scholars of disability, the Chicano movement, immigration, and LGBTQ studies.

Now in its seventh year of publication, the interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed the Journal of Civil and Human Rights is anchored by an editorial board that includes recent Pulitzer Prize winner in history, Heather Thompson (Blood in the Water, 2017) and the recent National Book Award winner in non-fiction, Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning, 2016).

“Under Mike Ezra’s editorship, the Journal of Civil and Human Rights has published cutting edge work on gender in the civil rights movement, on Black Ivy League activism, on police professionalization, how Gen X and younger scholars apprehend the freedom struggles of earlier generations and a host of necessary topics,” said Dean Hollis Robbins. “Our students are tremendously fortunate to have access to some of the most important scholars writing on diversity, equity, and inclusion from a scholarly perspective.”

The Journal’s powerhouse editorial board, which includes over forty scholars, makes Sonoma State University a hub for high-quality, publicly visible scholarship and positions it at the center of the national academic conversation on civil and human rights, where scholars and students can tap into the most important networks that constitute these subfields.

In 2016, the AMCS department was honored to bring Dr. Kendi to The Hub on campus to talk about his award-winning book. The strong quality of scholarship in the JCHR, endorsed and informed by the editorial board, ensures that the journal will impact various fields and contribute to important dialogues for many years. A recent JCHR article on journalist Charles Johnson won the 2019 Farrar Award for Media and Civil Rights History. Other universities, such as Mills College and the University of Texas, have begun to notice the journal’s work and have used it to understand and promote their own histories.

This press release was produced by Sonoma State University. The views expressed here are the author’s own.