The prize, which comes with an unrestricted award of $250,000, empowers progressive academics to pursue research and advocacy for racial and economic justice. 

“I am humbled and inspired to be included among such a powerful and thoughtful group of scholar activists,” said Gore. 

Fighting for Freedom with Scholarship

The Freedom Scholars awards, which began in 2020, are part of the Marguerite Casey Foundation’s overarching mission to bring power and voice to the peripheries of society. 

“The 2023 Freedom Scholars are at the forefront of teaching, researching and writing about shifting the balance of power in society,” said Carmen Rojas, Marguerite Casey Foundation president and CEO. “Marguerite Casey Foundation’s Freedom Scholars award is committed to providing social and economic justice scholars room to deepen their relationship with movement leaders fighting for a multiracial democracy and just economy.” 

Gore’s research touches on history, politics, activism, gender studies and the intersection of all four in the African diaspora. Her book Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War explores the untold stories of black, radical women during the onset of the Cold War. 

“As a scholar who centers Black women’s political thought and activism, I see my work as making visible the transformative power of people in collective action and the ways these activists have engaged, taken up and negotiated the intersecting forces of race, gender, sexuality and class in their organizing and theorizing,” said Gore.

Gore’s forthcoming book project is an examination of black women’s transnational travels and activism in the long 20th century, ranging from Ida B. Wells’ speaking tours of England and Scotland in the 1890s to the transnational campaign to free incarcerated activist and academic Angela Davis.

“Throughout her career, Dayo F. Gore has been a vital advocate for Black Studies’ global mission to pursue and sustain interdisciplinarity knowledge production and community activism for the betterment of humanity,” said , chair of the Department of African American Studies. “We are fortunate to have such a phenomenal scholar-teacher-activist at Georgetown.” 

Gore currently organizes with Scholars for Social Justice, a group of academics that mobilizes the knowledge, skills and resources of scholars to amplify and fight for a political agenda that insists on justice for all.

“Since joining the Department of African American Studies in 2020, Gore has made invaluable contributions to the department through her innovative courses centered on the cultural histories of Black Americans, Black women’s transnational activism and interdisciplinary research methods class,” said Horton-Stallings.

“‘Bitter Flower’ is about a profound conflict between Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells-Barnett,” explains Fink, a professor in the and core faculty in the . “The play asks us to confront the racist foundations of the women’s suffrage movement so a truly egalitarian movement can flower.”

Grounded in a historical moment whose realities are often obscured or forgotten, “Bitter Flower” is a riveting show that will have audiences rethinking their perceptions of the suffrage movement and the continued legacies of racism and classism in today’s social justice movements. 

“‘Bitter Flower’ brings two powerhouses to life,” Fink says. “Jane Addams was an immense force in American politics – the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize. She’s a leading suffragist, she’s a socialist, but she’s relying on racist rhetoric in her advocacy.”

The work highlights how tenuous and contentious political alliances were in American politics. It explores the ways that power imbalances affected who was heard and how far their voice traveled.

“Ida B. Wells-Barnett was born in slavery,” says Fink. “She became a publisher and a journalist, founded the NAACP with Frederick Douglass, helped start the civil rights movement and fight lynching and founded the Black women’s suffrage movement. Yet few learn about her in American public schools.” 

From Seed to Flower

Fink began working on the project more than three years ago to commemorate the centennial of the 19th amendment. With artist Julia Laffin, Fink developed a performance piece in 2020 entitled ‘UNDERBELLY’, which involved dual-sided sashes each representing individual suffragists. 

“We created 50 sashes corresponding to real suffragists – 25 white women and 25 Black women, with their names on one side and their forgotten history on the other,” says Fink. “In the case of the Black women, their unheralded achievements and, in the case of the white women, their bitter truth – that this was a racist movement.”

After delving into the history of the suffragist movement, and finding more than she’d expected, Fink couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to the story. After reading dueling editorials written by Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells-Barnett centering on lynching, racism and suffrage, Fink decided to take their public feud and dramatize it as a personal tĂȘte-Ă -tĂȘte. “Bitter Flower” is the product of an interdisciplinary collaboration between Fink and other artists, practitioners, thinkers and students. 

“Once I read the script, I saw that Jennifer had included these puppeteered hats, which functioned as a Greek chorus commenting on each side of the debate that Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Jane Addams are having,” recounts director . “I envisioned them as an ensemble of actors who would be able to use song and gestural language to comment on the conflict between these two women.”

Working with Jonathan Girling, a Broadway and Royal Shakespeare Company composer, the team has brought a strongly emotive, musical component to the production. 

“In one scene, we have a character composing a letter,” says Gonzalez, a professor in the and co-founder of the . “Jonathan has punctuated the beats of the letter with an incredible sound score to bring emotion and intensity to each word.”

Set in the waning days of the Gilded Age, “Bitter Flower” is brought to life by costumes and ornate hats, which are now worn by the actors instead of puppeteered. 

“We researched Edwardian and turn-of-the-century fashion,” explains assistant director and costume coordinator Daisy Steinthal (SFS’23). “We designed the looks for each character, and built costume pieces, most notably the hats our ensemble members wear.” 

Steinthal, a culture and politics (CULP) major with minors in theology and economics, has been excited to work alongside Gonzalez, whose work has appeared on PBS national television, at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, the Tribeca Performing Arts Center and a slew of professional and academic spaces. 

“Assisting Anita has been an incredible experience,” says Steinthal. “Each rehearsal, I learn more about directing through working alongside her and with our actors. I appreciate the relationship we have built, and I love the chance to hear about and discuss other projects she is working on across the country.” 

After each performance, audience members will be invited into a tea parlor staged by the artistic team to facilitate conversations around the historical realities of the suffrage movement with Georgetown experts in history, gender and justice and disability studies.

The show will run from November 16-19. Tickets are available through Eventbrite. 

“I’m incredibly honored and privileged to receive such recognition,” Chatelain says. “My goal with Franchise was to add nuance and history to our current conversations about race, health and injustice, and to add a new dimension to civil rights history by thinking about the role of business in imagining a racially just future.”  

Black Business, Black Society

Starting in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Chatelain’s book traces the interplay between Black capitalists, civil rights leaders, federal lending policies and fast food companies. As momentum propelling activists lost steam, Chatelain shows how pro-business policies led to wealth creation, and expanding franchises, within Black communities across America. 

“I have always been interested in food culture, cooking and the politics of the culinary world,” says Chatelain. “I love the way that food can bring people together, and how it can be used as a lens to explore so many dimensions of the human experience.”

Beyond the economics of fast food franchises as a vehicle for capital, Chatelain questioned how these spaces acted as fulcrums for community involvement in the second half of the 20th century and into the new millennium. 

“Part of what I was most interested in was the social aspect of the fast-food restaurant as a place where people gather, as a source of underwriting for youth sports, for different activities, for the community,  a place for people to access wifi and for senior citizens to hang out,” Chatelain says. “When we talk about fast food, we have to understand that the relationships people form with it are much bigger than the food that they provide.”

It’s Awards Season Every Season

Since its publication, Franchise has received numerous accolades. Last year, it won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for history and was selected as the Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) 2021 Lawrence W. Levine Award Winner. It was also selected as the winner of the 2021 Hagley Prize in Business History and named by New York Times critic Jenifer Szalai as Top Book of the Year in 2020.

A professor in the and the , Chatelain credits the community at Georgetown for its conducive environment for research. 

“I’ve benefited from the support of Georgetown colleagues and students in the research and writing process,” Chatelain says. “This book, in many ways, was a collective effort.”

Chatelain, who also wrote South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration, is active outside of her academic career. She delivers lectures and workshops on inclusive teaching, social movements and food justice on and off Georgetown’s campus. 

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“My hope is that I’m doing justice to the place, space, time and subjects around the study of Black Chicago kitchenettes and have opened the door for . . . new lines of inquiry [in]to the rich story that already exists [about] Black Chicago and the 20th century,” Morrison says. 

An Academic in the Archives

Morrison began teaching at the university in the fall of 2020. An affiliate faculty member with the , Morrison’s research spans a variety of interdisciplinary topics including race and space studies, 20th century African American literature, performance studies, urban humanities and the digital humanities.

“Topics like race require us to bring together various questions that are best answered by an interdisciplinary approach,” Morrison says.  

Morrison is currently working on Kitchenette Building: Race, Home Space, and Modernity in Great Migration Chicago, a first of its kind cultural history of Chicago’s mid-century kitchenette apartments, that was born out of her dissertation project. 

“Kitchenette apartment buildings, often in disrepair, contained apartments subdivided into ‘kitchenette’ units that were equipped with hot plates, separated by thin beaverboard walls and serviced by communal bathrooms,” explains Morrison. “These units, disproportionately located on Chicago’s South Side and inhabited by Black residents, were often converted illegally and rented out at exorbitant rates by neglectful, absentee landlords.” 

An academic with wide-ranging interests, Morrison said picking a single topic for her dissertation proved challenging, but she eventually found that she kept returning to literary texts produced in the 20th century during the Great Migration. While completing an archival fellowship with the Mellon Foundation-supported Black Metropolis Research Consortium, Morrison noticed that there was a gap in the historical records she was analyzing and chose to fill it as her dissertation. 

Morrison’s work expands on existing Great Migration literature by diving deeper on the city of Chicago and the physical space of kitchenette buildings. 

The kitchenette is featured in many famous pieces of Black literature such as Lorraine Hainsberry’s A Raisin the Sun, ​​Frank London Brown’s Trumbull Park, Richard Wright’s Native Son and Gwendolyn Brooks’ only novel Maud Martha. Brooks also wrote about the kitchenette in her book of poems A Street in Bronzeville. 

“You can’t really read African American literature at the time without encountering the kitchenette,” Morrison says. “I realized I didn’t have a good idea of what a kitchenette was and I kept finding snatches of it, passing mentions that suggested that they were bad without a more in-depth description. I thought to myself ‘I don’t know if there is enough archival data for me to write about kitchenettes in Chicago, but I feel like this book needs to exist because it’s so resonant in so many aspects of African American cultural expression of the period.’” 

In the early 20th century, the Great Migration resulted in a mass influx of people into cities like Chicago. However, because the Great Migration coincided with the Great Depression there was a significant cutback in new housing construction, and many people were left without a place to live. 

“The kitchenette was not only a landing point for migrants, but for people who had lived in Chicago prior to the start of the Great Migration,” Morrison explains. “Because there were not as many residences, whole buildings were converted to smaller units like kitchenettes. These became a part of the Black experience during that time in part because kitchenettes were   disproportionately located on the South Side, which was a predominantly Black community.”

During the Great Migration, white society and government entities were invested in residential segregation and achieved it through the rise in use of restrictive covenants and redlining. As more and more people came into the city, Black residents had fewer places to live, and increasingly large numbers of the Black community had to live in converted housing or kitchenettes. Ultimately, this led to stigmatization of the kitchenette. 

“In these neighborhoods landlords often wouldn’t pay to have the trash picked up, or there were higher instances of disease because so many people were staying together in tight quarters, so these communities became associated with illness, neglect and uncleanliness,” Morrison says. “The South Side was plagued by the ills that came with overcrowding and the kitchenette became the poster child for the slum.” 

Later, public housing became a “beacon of hope” for sanitary, clean and new housing that was precipitated by the kitchenette. Today, Chicago remains a segregated city due in part to housing policies during the Great Migration and Great Depression. 

“The government programs that enabled white buyers to move into the suburbs, establish them, and build wealth through homeownership were denied to Black homeowners,” says Morrison.  “We see an establishment of generational wealth during the time period of the kitchenette that Black individuals did not have access to in addition to the normalization of placement of different groups of people in different parts of the city that still persists today as a legacy of the entrenchment during the mid-twentieth century.”

Keeping Up with Kitchenettes

In addition to writing her book, Morrison has started a digital humanities project since she began working at Georgetown in the hopes of reaching a wider audience. 

“Academic writing isn’t always the best way to convey a story, so I have been developing this digital humanities project as another way for audiences to look at the data,” Morrison explains. 

With the help of undergraduate students, Morrison is creating an organizational system for a larger body of the archival documents she has accrued since she began her research and extracting references to the kitchenette from them. 

“Going through an archival document to find references to the kitchenette is in some ways like a scavenger hunt because the documents rarely say outright ‘this was a kitchenette,’” Morrison says. “We have been looking at slum clearance documents, documentary photography, housing court documents and language around urban renewal to get a sense of how expansive the use of the kitchenette was.” 

After the Archive

This fall, Morrison is teaching a new course called Literature in the Archive, which emerged out of the professor’s own experience (and inspiration by the likes of Toni Morrison and Saidiya Hartman) of employing  literature to address vast gaps in archival references and using the archive to ground literary study. 

She is also completing a grant proposal for the Mellon Foundation on a collaborative project on creative placemaking, Black ecologies and Black spatial futures. Morrison hopes to engage individuals from across the Georgetown community including in various humanities disciplines, the Law School, the Racial Justice Institute and the School of Foreign Service as well as from Consortium universities. 

“I’m invested in liberatory and anti-oppressive politics, and I especially want to clarify how people are being exploited in ways that make them accomplices in their own suffering,” says Board. “A little heavy, but ultimately I want people to know how to avoid being played and have better ways to advocate for themselves and their beliefs.”

Maintaining Momentum

Published by Oxford University Press, Invisible Weapons is crucial at this moment as social justice movements, like the Movement for Black Lives, are under threat of ending. Board wrote this book as a guideline to strengthen today’s movement, so that it does not go the same way as others. 

“After the Civil Rights Movement ended, all of the progress made over the movement’s fifty year span was rolled back — we can’t let that happen again,” Board says. “Justice movements come and go, but, when we understand that their going has to do with a repressive government, then we can better fortify the movement gains, prepare for the next uprising and be ready for the inevitable backlash.” 

Invisible Weapons is a meticulously curated testament to grassroots communities. The book’s cover art was done by , an artist in Baltimore, and Board’s data is sourced from grassroots communities describing their experiences. 

The professor says that the interviews with local organizers and blurbs from scholars alike are “all the product of relationships built on a foundation of mutual respect and compassion.” 

“None of this is possible without acknowledging the reciprocated commitment to humanity that has moved my life beyond the school-to-prison pipeline and into the lion’s den of academia,” Board explains. “All my successes heretofore and into the future are about real people doing what we can to stick together and build. So, in short, I’d include a big thank you from me to my loved ones and I hope I make them proud.”

“Marcus Board’s Introduction to African-American Studies class opened my thinking to a whole new world of critical analysis,” reflects Fatima Dyfan (C’21). “The look into blackness, community and power that he provided his students was radical – solving issues from their roots and seeking ideas of love and communal care in politics, culture, and history. And, not only were we learning the how through academics, we were empowered to engage in radical actions within our lives.”

Dyfan, who majored in government and African-American studies with a theatre and performance studies minor, worked with Board on Invisible Weapons.

“It was a blessing to be a part of his process as a student in his intelligence community and as his book indexer because I felt as though my ideas mattered as well in his discovery and share of truth,” says Dyfan. “I can’t wait for audiences to interact with this work and we continue to investigate our systems to illuminate more experiences concealed within our society.” 

Board’s interests in this topic originate from when he started becoming involved in his community and community advocacy at 17 years old. His experiences working for others led him to begin asking questions like ‘What holds us back?’ or ‘What are the sensitive conversations that must be handled with care?’ and ‘How is intellectualism and academia potentially helpful in these grassroots struggles for power?’

“Ultimately, I have been drawn to questions about justice and change from my experiences with young people, from Black communities and through the miracle of radical Black feminism that saved me,” Board says. “In the end, because I was sincere in my commitments to oppressed people everywhere, this work was the inevitable outcome. And I hope to do much more.”

Angelyn Mitchell, an associate professor in the Departments of English and African American Studies, sat down with Coates to discuss the motivations behind both his previous work and future endeavors. Mitchell, who was the founding director of the African American Studies Program from 2003-2013, and who regularly teaches an African American Studies course devoted to Coates’s work, asked the writer to reflect on his years of reporting and his pivot away from journalism. 

Of her course, Mitchell explained, “Centering Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power in my African American Studies course encourages and challenges my students to see American history anew. My students enjoy reading and discussing his essays because they raise and amplify many issues of current importance and concern, especially the significance of race in America.”

Coates, who played an integral role in driving the national conversation around race, racism and politics for a decade, left the Atlantic to pursue more creative work in 2018. For Coates, anytime he wrote about politics, he ultimately struck upon the vein of racism in American life. Through his writing, Coates has striven to show that to understand the country one must first understand slavery and all that flowed from it, including indelible components of America’s literature, music and popular culture. 

“The crime of enslavement is at the root, which extends through the trunk and out into the branches and into the leaves of this country, and you cannot get away from it,” Coates says. “You take slavery away, you don’t have a country. You take away the labor and the profits that were made, and you don’t have a country.“

With the election of President Obama as the first Black man in the nation’s highest office, a widespread, post-racial optimism swept the country – one that elided the reality of slavery. According to Coates, many prominent thinkers and pundits wanted to relegate slavery to the periphery – one sphere of many in American life. 

“My role was to convince other Americans that they live in a state erected by other human beings and not by Gods,” Coates says. “That they live in a place that manifests all the flaws and all the problems that other states built by human beings manifest. I don’t want you to feel bad. I want you to feel like I feel, which is to be human. To have some sort of humility about who you are and about your collective identity and how you walk through the world.”

Coates reflected on his research and writing around the Civil War and the Jim Crow-era South. Despite the research conducted and the facts marshaled forth, Coates ran up against an anti-historical undercurrent in America’s popular imagination, one that couldn’t reconcile the reality of the world with the world as they wanted it to be. 

“It would be like someone insisting that one plus one is actually five. And what I eventually realized is that there is an architecture that has been erected in this world and in this country dedicated to telling people that one plus one is, in fact, equal to five,” Coates reflects. And to tell them that it is two is actually quite difficult, no matter how many facts I had assembled”

To continue his work, Coates left the field of journalism and the fray of day-to-day political spats and set his sights on the mythology underpinning American culture. 

“It became clear, to me, that if we ever wanted to win this argument in any sort of long-term way then we had to recreate something, we had to recreate that place, that thing – the facts beneath the facts, and that is the place where your literature lives, where your movies live and, in many ways, that’s the place where your history lives.” 

The Lecture Fund, a student-run organization that organizes speaking events on Georgetown’s campus to “enlighten, educate and, occasionally, entertain,” extended the invitation to Coates, managed the logistics and was the main sponsor of the event. The event was co-sponsored by the Department of History, the American Studies Program, the Department of English, the Department of African-American Studies, the Journalism Program and the Justice & Diversity in Action community. 

“It’s exciting on numerous levels to be able to bring back Reg and Alex as instructors,” says Derek Goldman, chair of the Department of Performing Arts. “As faculty of course we have indelible memories of meeting both of them for the first time and of their own work in these very courses. What’s really thrilling is that our current students now not only have the gifts of their experience and their brilliant pedagogy but to witness firsthand a generational line to alums who are working at the top of their fields and to be able to engage them about their journey”.   

A Passion for Performance

Like many students, Douglas first came to Georgetown hoping to study politics and planned on lobbying for education reform and community development after graduation. 

While at the university, Douglas became active in the șŁœÇÂÛÌł Democrats club on campus and 

eventually got internships on the Hill and at an education lobbying firm. Though he had landed his “dream job,” Douglas said the experiences felt “impersonal and unfulfilling.”

“I wanted to find a more hands-on way to approach these ideas and reach diverse communities,” Douglas says. “When I took a course called Political Theater, the light bulb went off – I could use my love of theater to ignite conversations and empathy in the community and I never looked back.”

Douglas ultimately declared a double major in English and Theatre and Performance Studies with a minor in African American Studies. He participated in a production for Big Love — a multiracial collaborative staging directed by Maya Roth, artistic director for the Davis Center for Performing Arts. It was here that he discovered that directing was his passion.

“It was clear that he had a calling: to make theater that charts space for difference, incubates creative development and fosters socially engaged reflective engagement,” says Roth. Across his course and creative work, Reg brought extraordinary charisma, interdisciplinary questions, candor and great talent, which inspired peers and faculty alike.” 

Similarly to Douglas, Templer did not come to Georgetown expecting to pursue a career in acting. A psychology major with a focus in neuroscience and a minor in performing arts, Templer was a student who was deeply inquisitive about the world. 

“I am and was less interested in being an ‘actor’ than I am just being a human with an appetite for life and curiosity about the way we experience it,” Templer explains. “My interests have, at times, felt like divergences from the acting world. I have worked on political campaigns, studied neuroscience, joined a Buddist sangha and became a founding member of an anti-capitalist theatre company. But, all of these things — politics, philosophy, psychology, science, and art — are just other ways of grappling with essentially the same questions. Georgetown taught me the worthiness of asking those questions.” 

While on campus, Templer worked under both Roth and Goldman on a broad range of plays including Far Away, Trojan Barbie, Hamlet and Slow Falling Bird. During her senior year, she did an original solo performance featured at Lav Grad, which, according to Roth “artfully framed the necessity of queer identity and rights.” 

“Alex made a big impression on me as a prospective — she gravitated to projects with global stakes because she wanted to grow her toolkit and worldview simultaneously,” says Roth. “A consummate artist, Alex has a magnetic depth of connection to theater-making and, too, to the kind of theater labs that we foreground in TPST: socially engaged, boldly multidisciplinary and pluralist.”

From Mentee to Mentor

After graduating, Douglas pursued his passion for theatre, going on to direct and produce over 70 new and contemporary plays, musicals, and multimedia projects by noteworthy playwrights. Throughout his career, Reginald has integrated equity, diversity, inclusion, community engagement and education into all of his work. 

Likewise, Templer continued her career as an actor, receiving her MFA from NYU Graduate Acting in 2018 and spending summers working professionally at Williamstown Theater Festival. After graduating, Templer appeared in a variety of New York theater productions and landed her first film and television roles, starring in  When They See US (2019,) What Doesn’t Float (2020) and We Crashed (post prod.) 

Both alumni are applying their skill sets to the courses they are instructing this fall and emphasized that the mentors they had at the university helped to shape them as artists and individuals. 

“I was very blessed to have fulfilling relationships with many professors at the university including Derek Goldman who remains a constant mentor, colleague and friend and who encouraged me to come back home to the Hilltop and teach this semester,” says Douglas. “Natsu Onoda Power, Maya Roth, Nadine George-Graves, Susan Lynsey Karen Berman and Ted Parker were also core to my experience here. Dr. Angelyn Mitchell, who led the African American Studies program and taught me in several English courses, was a guiding force and source of inspiration for me.”

Templer says that Goldman, Roth, Natsu Onoda Power, and Susan Lynskey are “collectively probably the reason I do this at all”. 

“They made theater something other than entertainment, they made it engagement with the socio-political world,” Templer explains. “My teachers, who became steady and consistent mentors for me over the following 6 years of my career, taught me that the mind could be of use, could be directed outward to make not just good theatre, but smart theatre that says something about the world.” 

This academic year, the Theatre and Performance Studies Program and Davis Center will celebrate its “Sweet Sixteen.” Goldman says that the program looks forward to welcoming other illustrious alumni of the program to campus. 

“It’s gratifying for us as a relatively young program to take stock of the impact that so many alumni are having in and beyond our field — and to be able to invite them back to connect deeply with students,” he says. “They each in their own way have been blazing a trail that embodies the deepest values of our program — innovative artistry engaged with social change and the greater good, leadership and vision and collaboration at the highest level.”

More About Douglas and Templer 

Douglas currently serves as the associate artistic director at Studio Theatre in Washington, DC. While there, Douglas commissioned creative projects centering Black artists and voices in response to Juneteenth, the March on Washington and the ongoing fight for racial justice. Douglas also piloted a series called “Restorative Relationships” that were conversations with local BIPOC community leaders and the theatre. The director also supervised the painting of public murals and the opening of Studio’s lobby to marchers in support of the Black Lives Matter protests of Summer 2020. 

Last year, Douglas was named the recipient of the National Theatre Conference’s Emerging Professional Award. 

In addition to teaching at Georgetown, he also guest lectures in directing and producing at the O’Neill’s National Theatre Institute. He has previously taught at the New School, Carnegie Mellon University, Boston University, University of Missouri at Kansas City, Point Park University, and the University of Pittsburgh.

Templer has taught acting at summer intensives for Williamstown Theater festival where she worked for two sequential seasons. In 2018, Templer appeared in Tony award winner Rachel Chavkin’s world premiere musical Lempicka. Immediately following, she would go on to play Trisha Meili in Ava Duvernay’s Netflix series “When They See Us.” 

In 2019, Templer starred in director David McCallum’s production of Cymbeline for Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. She is a member of Society Theater company in New York and has worked for New Ohio Theatre, the Public and the 24 Hour Play Festivals. Templer is currently in development for a new play about themes of spirituality and “wellness” with Society Theatre Co.

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A Record of Reporting

From Miami, FL, Alcindor majored in English and government and minored African American studies while at Georgetown. She was also actively involved in the Baker Scholars Program, where she helped to develop the program’s Baker Difference efforts that was committed to linking business opportunities and social impact.  

Bernie Cook, associate dean in the șŁœÇÂÛÌł who worked closely with the Baker Scholars Program, says that her passion for journalism and reporting was evident while she was still an undergraduate. 

“Yamiche always had a keen sense of the centrality of questions of justice,” Cook explains. “While studying English and government at Georgetown, Yamiche employed the tools of language and analysis to seek deeper understandings. She began to see journalism as a way to connect these threads, as a mode for seeking the truth that is a necessary precondition for justice.”

“We are enormously proud to count Yamiche among the alumni of Georgetown șŁœÇÂÛÌł,” states Doyle McManus, director of . “She’s exactly the kind of journalist Georgetown strives to educate: brilliant, tireless and committed to shining light in dark places.”

While there wasn’t a formal Journalism Program at the time Alcindor was attending the șŁœÇÂÛÌł, she took several Journalism classes from the program’s founding director, Barbara Feinman Todd, and found a valuable mentor in longtime instructor Athelia Knight of The Washington Post. “I was impressed by her passion for journalism,” says Knight. “She was always looking for ways to gain hands-on experience while taking classes
. I think she had an internship every summer while she was at Georgetown.”

From the Hilltop to Covering the Hill

After graduating, Alcindor went on to receive a master’s degree in broadcast news and documentary filmmaking from New York University and has since worked for various news outlets including Newsday and USA Today.

Alcindor has been active in political journalism, covering the Trump administration and the campaigns of several presidential candidates for The New York Times including Bernie Sanders. Currently, she is reporting on the Biden administration. 

The alumna is the ninth moderator of the Peabody Award-winning Washington Week. She also works as a White House correspondent for the PBS NewsHour and as a political contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. 

In 2017, The Root listed Alcindor as one of the top 100 most influential African Americans aged 25-45. She was also chosen for the 2020 Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage from the White House Correspondents’ Association and as the 2020 recipient for the Gwen Ifill Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF). McManus states that he and Alcindor first met thanks to Ifill, “I was lucky enough to get to know Yamiche when the late Gwen Ifill put us together as panelists on PBS’s Washington Week.”

Alcindor is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and was named the organization’s 2020 Journalist of the Year.

“I’m incredibly humbled and shocked by this recognition – I had no idea that my book was under consideration,” says Chatelain. “I’m so grateful to all the students and colleagues who supported this work over the years, and I hope that this recognition encourages other historians to think seriously about the everyday aspects of our lives, like fast food, that can illustrate rich and important histories.”

Medals, McDonalds and Marcia

A professor in the Department of History and the Department of African American Studies, Chatelain is an expert in the fields of Black life and culture.

In her book Franchise, Chatelain meticulously researches the ways in which fast-food franchises like McDonald’s became one of the greatest generators of Black wealth in America through first-hand accounts and government documents. 

“Taking us from the first McDonald’s drive-in in San Bernardino in the 1940s to civil rights protests at franchises in the American South in the 1960s and the McDonald’s on Florissant Avenue in Ferguson in the summer 2014, Chatelain charts how the fight for racial justice is intertwined with the fate of Black businesses,” writes the Pulitzer Prize committee. “Deeply researched and brilliantly told, Franchise is an essential story of race and capitalism in America.”

Earlier this year, Franchise was chosen as the Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) 2021 Lawrence W. Levine Award winner. It was also selected as the winner of the 2021 Hagley Prize in Business History and named by New York Times critic Jenifer Szalai as Top Book of the Year in 2020. Now a Pulitzer Prize winner, the book has been given one of the most prestigious awards in the category of history.

“Marcia Chatelain’s impressive study and winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, Franchise, has left an indelible mark on historical analysis, food studies, and Black studies,” says Soyica Colbert, dean of Georgetown șŁœÇÂÛÌł. “The award affirms the excellence and importance of Chatelain’s work.”

Chatelain is also the author of South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration. She has won several teaching awards at Georgetown, and has served on the working group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation. During the 2017–2018 academic year she was on leave as a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellow and was recently named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. 

The professor has dedicated her life to chronicling the history of the Black community to give a more comprehensive understanding to the systems that shape our world and influence the current structures of society. Bryan McCann, chair of the history department, says that “this {award} is both wonderful and richly-deserved.” 

“Marcia’s book deftly explores the intersection of race, inequality, food and consumer capitalism in a sophisticated but accessible way,” he continues. “We are thrilled to see the Pulitzer committee recognize this achievement!”

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