Faculty and Staff
Clarence Lang
Assistant Professor of History and Afro-American Studies
Clarence Lang is an Assistant Professor in the African American Studies & Research Program, and the Department of History. His areas of specialization are twentieth-century African American history (with emphases on working-class formation, social movements, and the Midwest and border South); urban history; and comparative labor (U.S. and southern Africa). Professor Lang’s current research focuses on black community activism and class politics in St. Louis, Missouri between the Great Depression and the end of the Great Society; he is completing his book manuscript, tentatively titled From the Bottom Bloc: Black Freedom Struggle and Class Politics in the Gateway City, 1936-75. He has been a Research Associate at Wayne State University, a Summer Fellow at the Missouri Historical Society Library and Research Center, and a Beckman Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study. His publications include “Between Civil Rights and Black Power in the Gateway City: The Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION), 1964-75,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Spring 2004): 725-754; “Civil Rights Versus ‘Civic Progress’: The St. Louis NAACP and the City Charter Fight, 1956-1957,” Journal of Urban History, Vol. 34, No. 4 (May 2008): 609-638; and “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” (co-authored with Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua) Journal of African American History, Vol. 92, No. 2 (Spring 2007): 265-288. He is co-editing, with Robbie Lieberman, a volume entitled Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement. Professor Lang is a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Urban History, and Peace & Change: A Journal of Peace Research, and has developed courses on “Class Politics and Black Community” and “African American Urban History since 1917.” He received his doctorate in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2004.