Description:

Please join the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies and the Center for African American History for their annual Distinguished Lecture on African American History, featuring Donna Murch:

"Crack in Los Angeles: Policing the Crisis and the War on Drugs"

Donna Murch is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. In October 2010, Murch published the award-winning monograph Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California with the University of North Carolina Press, which won the Phillis Wheatley prize in December 2011. She has published articles in the Journal of American History, Journal of Urban History, OAH Magazine of History, Black Scholar, Souls, Perspectives, New Politics, and Jacobin.

The award winning film maker Stanley Nelson’s Black Panther Party documentary, “Vanguard of the Revolution” featured her research and Murch’s recent essay, “Ferguson’s Inheritance,” on the historical continuities between the Watts rebellion and protests in the St. Louis metro area reached a broader audience beyond traditional academic venues. In addition to appearing in more popular publications, Murch co-edited a special edition of the Journal of Urban History on mass incarceration and urban spaces for the September 2015 issue. While working on a new book on the Reagan Era drug war in Los Angeles, Professor Murch is also completing an edited volume on the late twentieth carceral state entitled Challenging Punishment: Race and the War on Drugs.