Faculty Spotlight: Brian Daugherity

Professor, Department of History

Written by Maggie Unverzagt Goddard, Postdoctoral Fellow, History Dept.; Associate Director, Health Humanities Lab; Co-Director, Public Humanities Lab

As the Co-Director of the Public Humanities Lab at the HRC, Brian Daugherity draws on his extensive experience using collaboration as a methodology. Combining history and education, his work is not just limited to learning about the past; rather, Daugherity focuses on the past to learn important lessons and to find how it connects with the present.

Brian Daugherity's research focuses on the implementation of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision in Virginia. He teaches courses on the History of the Civil Rights Movement, the History of Virginia, and the History of the United States since 1865. Daugherity also has taught a number of traveling courses, including an interdisciplinary class on the civil rights movement in the South, and another on the history of Virginia via a month-long boating trip down the James River.

In 2014, Daugherity co-taught “Footprints on the James: The Human and Natural History of Virginia” with James Vonesh and Dan Carr, two VCU biology professors, to explore the history and biology of the James River watershed, and how the two disciplines overlap and intersect. Along with their students, the faculty traveled a roughly 150-mile section of the James via sea kayak, canoe, raft, and bateau while backpacking and camping along the way.

Daugherity is currently co-writing a book and co-producing a documentary film, with Dr. Jody L. Allen, on the 1968 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Charles C. Green v. New Kent County, Virginia. The Green case was one of the most important school desegregation decisions of this era, yet its story remains relatively unknown. This collaborative research project builds on Daugherity’s book Keep On Keeping On, which offers a comprehensive view of African Americans’ efforts to obtain racial equality in Virginia in the later twentieth century.

Virginia was a battleground state in the struggle to implement Brown v. Board of Education, with one of the South’s largest and strongest NAACP units fighting against a program of noncompliance crafted by the state’s political leaders. Keep On Keeping On offers a detailed examination of how African Americans and the NAACP in Virginia successfully pursued a legal agenda that provided new educational opportunities for the state’s Black population in the face of fierce opposition from segregationists and the Democratic Party of Harry F. Byrd Sr. Blending social, legal, southern, and African American history, that book shed new light on the civil rights movement and white resistance to civil rights in Virginia and the South.

As the Co-Director of the Public Humanities Lab, Daugherity continues his commitment to collaboration and interdisciplinary work as an urgent and generative methodology. The Public Humanities Lab features ongoing public humanities work at VCU through the Public Humanities Here and Now speaker series and other collaborations across campuses.

Select Publications

• With All Deliberate Speed: Implementing Brown v. Board of Education, edited with Charles C. Bolton (University of Arkansas Press, 2008)
• Keep On Keeping On: The NAACP and the Implementation of Brown v. Board of Education in Virginia (University of Virginia Press, 2016)
• A Little Child Shall Lead Them: A Documentary Account of the Struggle for School Desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia, edited with Brian Grogan (University of Virginia Press, 2019)