Historical Relevance

In August 2014, during Clint Smith’s first week in graduate school, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot by a police officer in Ferguson, a suburb north of St. Louis, Missouri. As protests spread across the US, people wanted to understand what had happened to Brown in Ferguson and to Eric Garner in New York City and to John Crawford III in Beavercreek, Ohio, and to countless other unarmed black men and women in America.

In a carrel in Widener Library, Smith, a PhD candidate in education, found himself reading the scholarly texts that explained the present moment. “Part of what you learn when you study history and sociology, is that you can make sense of the current situation by tracing it back to a series of state sanctioned political and economic social phenomena that happened across decades and centuries,” Smith explains.

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