About Le Datta

Black history lies at the core of my intellectual passions.

I hold a PhD in history from the University of Kentucky and my core research focuses on Black communities and education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More specifically, my scholarship explores a distinct body of segregated schools now known as Rosenwald Schools. While popular narratives of the schools center the work of philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, who partially funded the schools, my work questions what rural Black southerners did on their own behalf, and it reveals that poor Black southerners outgave Rosenwald and played a critical role in the conception, construction, management, and upkeep of the schools.

Far too often, stories of Black determination and activism go unwritten or unexplored. My scholarship seeks to correct this.

Three key principles guide my work: Black agency, agenda, and desire. I examine Black Americans lives through the lens of power, will, and aspiration, and my work demonstrates that they were/are not only stakeholders in the socio-political identity of America, but its shapers and plumbline.

 While my work holds important implications in the academy, my goal as a Black woman and historian is to share my work widely as a tool for social and structural change. Activism undergirds my work. And my goal is to share the unextinguishable joy, intelliegence, flare, and self-defining defiance that defines and informs Black history.