Matthew Washington

Background

About Matthew Washington

A scholar of northern civil rights and the African American experience more broadly, Matthew George Washington is an assistant professor of history at Prairie View A&M University. Originally from southeastern Pennsylvania, Washington received his PhD in history from Morgan State University. His book, “The Jim Crow North: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Pottstown, Pennsylvania” was officially released by the University Press of Kentucky on June 25, 2024, and is a part of the press’s series, “Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century.” Located in southeastern Pennsylvania, “The Jim Crow North” demonstrates that Pottstown was a crucial center of the Black freedom struggle. Moreover, unlike most of the previous studies on northern civil rights that usually examine large cities, this groundbreaking work underscores Pottstown—a locale that never exceeded residents—and how activists there, Black and white, struggled for African American equality and first-class citizenship from World War II through the late 1960s. In addition to “The Jim Crow North,” Washington has contributed to the edited compilations, “For the Sake of Peace: Africana Perspectives on Racism, Justice, and Peace in America” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), and “Contemporary Debates in Social Justice: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Exploring the Lives of Black and Brown Americans” (Kendall Hunt, 2021). His scholarship has also appeared in “The Griot: The Journal of African American Studies” (Fall, 2023).