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.

From 2022-2024, I was a visiting scholar with The Memory Project at the UVA Karsh Institute of Democracy. I currently serve as a national advisor for the Out(sider) Preservation Initiative and as a state board member of the Virginia Tourism Corporation (Virginia is for Lovers®).