“Black Politics and Education Crises at the Turn of the 1980s”, 2025 BMRC Fellows Fall Presentation by Nicholas Kryczka – Oct 22, 2025

The Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) invites you to join us on Wednesday, October 22, 2025, from 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM CST for a virtual presentation in the 2025 Fellows Fall Speaker Series.

Nicholas Kryczka is an Assistant Professor of Secondary Education for Social Studies at National Louis University and a Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Dr. Kryczka will share the results of his research this summer as a BMRC Research Fellow, in his talk, "Black Politics and Education Crises at the Turn of the 1980s."

A historian, teacher educator, and lifelong Chicagoan, Kryczka is currently writing a book on the political and intellectual history of urban school reform in late-20th-century Chicago. By tracing continuities from the desegregation debates of the 1960s–70s to the era of school choice and accountability, his work reveals how urban neighborhoods were shaped by post–civil rights education policy, how nonprofit actors gained influence in local politics, and how Chicago became a national laboratory for school reform.

Discussant: Dr. Toussaint Losier, Associate Professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. A historian whose work focuses on grassroots responses to mass incarceration in postwar Chicago. He teaches African American history, Black politics, and criminal justice policy, and has published in Souls, Radical History Review, and The Journal of Urban History. He is co-author of Rethinking the American Prison Movement and is completing a book titled War for the City: Black Chicago and the Rise of the Carceral State.

Join us online via Zoom: https://bit.ly/4pP7mXa