This panel brings together Kimberley Johnson (NYU and Oxford) and Sarena Martinez (Yale), two scholars working on contemporary Black urban politics and history. After summarizing their current book projects, Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis, and Urban Power, Black Mayors: Managing Inequality in Kurt Schmoke's Baltimore, the panellists discuss twentieth and twenty-first century Black urban politics and history more broadly.Â
Professor Kimberley Johnson is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, an Affiliate Faculty Member of the Wagner School of New York University, and the John G. Winant Visiting Professor of US Politics and Government at the University of Oxford. She is the author of two books, Reforming Jim Crow (2010) and Governing the American State (2007) and numerous articles on American political development and its intersection with racial and ethnic politics. Her current book manuscript explores the development of black power urbanism in Newark and East Orange, New Jersey and Oakland and East Palo Alto, California.
Dr Sarena Martinez is a student at Yale Law School and a Rhodes Scholar. Her Oxford doctoral dissertation, which she successfully defended in October 2024, examined urban governance in Baltimore during the tenure of the city’s first elected Black mayor, Kurt L. Schmoke. She previously served as a Manager of Special Projects in the Department of Innovation and Economic Opportunity at the City of Birmingham, Alabama, and has written articles for the Metropole and the Law and Political Economy Project. She is currently turning her doctoral dissertation into a book. Â
