Patrick Jones

Patrick Jones was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his B.A. in “American History, Politics and Society” from Kenyon College in 1993 and his Ph.D. in modern U.S. History and African American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002. Jones researches, writes and teaches about the civil rights/Black Power era, America in the 1960s, race relations, urban inequality, social movements, electoral politics, African American experience in the “Jazz Age,” and post-WWII American popular culture. Harvard University published his award-winning book, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee, in 2009. Tim Tyson called the book “…a riveting new story of the civil rights movement in America, a tale on par with Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery in its power and importance” and Jeanne Theoharis has written, “The Selma of the North provides a devastating rebuttal of many of the conventional narratives of the civil rights movement.” Jones is currently editing a collection of essays that explore the relationship(s) of music to the civil rights and Black Power era and working on a new monograph that looks at the contested meanings of civil rights and Black Power in Cleveland. He is guest-editing an upcoming issue of The Magazine of History on the black freedom movement in the urban North and also collects oral histories with local people about their experiences in the 1960s.