Ypsilanti, Michigan 48197
Assistant Professor of Africology and African American Studies
Africology and African American Studies
614J Pray Harrold
Peter Blackmer's research and teaching explore the ways in which Black-led grassroots organizing campaigns for self-determination in the 20th and 21st Century United States have shaped local and national politics through struggles for civil rights, human rights, and political power in American cities.
His current book project explores the local dynamics and national implications of Black Freedom Struggles in Harlem during the modern Civil Rights era. Through a street-level examination of Harlem's Black Radical Tradition and grassroots organizing campaigns around housing, education, employment, and policing, this book analyzes how Harlem residents challenged institutional racism and shaped national struggles for Black liberation in the urban north. By centering the voices of grassroots organizers and local people who envisioned and fought for a radically different world in the face of institutional racism and violent repression, the book offers a critical intervention in popular discourse around the urban rebellions of the 1960s and their legacies and recurrence today.
He is also the lead researcher for "The North: Civil Rights and Beyond in Urban America," a national digital humanities project on Black Freedom Struggles in the urban north, based in Newark, NJ. This work has produced public programming and exhibits, community classes, public school curricula, and educational websites on African American history in Newark and Detroit.
He was previously a Research Fellow with the Detroit Equity Action Lab (DEAL), an initiative of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University Law School. At DEAL, he conducted community-driven research on current issues of institutional racism and ongoing grassroots struggles for human rights and self-determination in Detroit.