LaShawn Harris

Associate Professor of History Michigan State University

East Lansing MI

LaShawn Harris's research engages with women, gender, sexuality; labor and the working class; urban history; and social and cultural change.

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Biography

LaShawn Harris is an Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University and Assistant Editor for the Journal of African American History. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Social History, Journal of Urban History, and the Journal of Women's History. Harris is also the author of the prize-winning Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners won the Darlene Clark Hine Book Prize (Best Book in African American Women’s and Gender History) from the Organization of American Historians as well as the Philip Taft Book Award (Best Book in American Labor & Working-Class History) from The Labor and Working-Class History Association. The book explores the lives of African American women in New York City’s expansive informal economy by drawing on police and prison records, newspaper accounts, and period literature. More broadly, Dr. Harris’s research engages with women, gender, and sexuality; labor and the working class; urban history; and social and cultural change. She received a Ph.D. in history from Howard University in 2007.

Industry Expertise

Education/Learning

Areas of Expertise

Women, Gender, and Sexuality

Labor and the Working Class

Urban History

Social and Cultural Change

Accomplishments

Darlene Clark Hine Book Prize, (Best Book in African American Women’s and Gender History), Organization of American Historians

2017

Philip Taft Book Award (Best Book in American Labor & Working-Class History), The Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) & Cornell University School of Industrial & Labor Relations

2017

Education

Howard University

Ph.D.

History

2007

News

How Harlem's 'Queen of Numbers' built a gambling empire and used her wealth to give back to the Black community

Insider online

2022-08-31

"To leave her home country, she had to be a dreamer, a risk-taker," LaShawn Harris, associate professor at Michigan State University and author of "Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy," told Insider. "St. Clair wanted more for herself, and her community."

This Woman Built a Formidable Gambling Empire in 1920s Harlem

History online

2022-05-09

“Numbers gambling enabled many African Americans to supplement low wages and [attain] economic security,” writes LaShawn Harris, a Michigan State University history professor and the author of Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy. “Some enjoyed the opportunity of attaining wealth and financial independence. With their winnings, blacks paid bills, bought radios and clothes, and even started their own numbers operations.”

Journal Articles

Beyond the Shooting: Eleanor Gray Bumpurs, Identity Erasure, and Family Activism against Police Violence

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society

2019

This article recovers the life of Bronx resident Eleanor Bumpurs from historical obscurity, moving beyond her tragic death and departing from disability and legal studies that primarily focus on her killing and New York Police Department officer Stephen Sullivan’s 1987 bench trial.

“Women and Girls in Jeopardy by His False Testimony”: Charles Dancy, Urban Policing, and Black Women in New York City during the 1920s

Journal of Urban History

2018

Troubling partnerships between the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and criminal informants during the mid-1920s adversely impacted urban African American women’s daily lives. Part of multiple hierarchies of municipal corruption, undercover surveillance operations represented one of many apparatuses law enforcers employed to criminalize black women’s ordinary behavior, to reinforce Progressive era images of black female criminality and promiscuity, and to deny women of their personhood and civil rights.

The “Commonwealth of Virginia vs. Virginia Christian”: Southern Black Women, Crime & Punishment in Progressive Era Virginia Get access Arrow

Journal of Social History

2014

In 1912, sixteen-year-old Hampton, Virginia resident and laundress Virginia Christian killed her white employer: fifty-one year-old widow and mother Ida Belote. Contributing to the expanding historical scholarship on African American women, this essay employs Christian’s life as a window into the lived experiences of some southern working-class black women during the early twentieth century.