Cultural organizer and public historian specializing in rural movement building, Black cultural rights and memory, and cultural sustainability in Central Virginia.

I was raised in Farmville, Virginia, where my family were litigants in the U.S. Supreme Court's 1964 Griffin decision outlawing local "massive resistance” to school desegregation. A half-century later, I had the honor of directing the opening of the Moton Museum's national award-winning permanent exhibition on my community's Civil Rights Era activism.

As a cultural organizer, I work with communities, policymakers, and media to advance place-based, decolonial learning and power building — previously with the General Assembly and Northam Administration to create Virginia’s Black, Indigenous, & People of Color Historic Preservation Fund and as a co-founder of William & Mary’s Lemon Project on race and public history.

I currently serve as a visiting scholar with The Memory Project at the UVA Karsh Institute of Democracy and on the state boards of the Center for Nonprofit Excellence (CNE) and the Virginia Tourism Corporation (Virginia is for Lovers®).