I came to history by making mistakes.
I have never been much of a science girlie. My middle-school science fair project was simple: one seed in the sunlight, the other in a dark cabinet. To my surprise, the seed on the windowsill never sprouted. Not a leaf. The one in the dark did. It was pale and spindly, but it was a plant.
Not at all what I expected.
I walked away with a compass I didn't realize I needed: the best questions—and answers—do not always stay in their lane. I learned to stay curious when the answer didn't behave and to follow the question wherever it led.
Black women’s literature gave that curiosity a historical direction. Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Zora Neale Hurston, J. California Cooper, Toni Cade Bambara, and more made the past feel inhabited rather than abstract. Their work made me want to know more about the women, communities, institutions, and structures behind those stories.
Following their stories led me to history. I wanted to understand not just the women themselves, but the worlds they were trying to make: how they built institutions, gathered resources, navigated power, and imagined freedom. That curiosity became the work I do now as a historian of Black economic life and the struggle for freedom.
Image Credit: Dom Garrett-Scott, @domthefurious
My Scholarship
My scholarship explores Black economic life, institutions, and the struggle for freedom. Across my books, articles, and public-facing work, I trace how Black people built, used, and challenged economic systems in pursuit of not just power and security but possibility.
Click on an image below to read some of my selected works.
Remembering Ida,
Ida Remembering
Ida B. Wells and Black Political Culture in Reconstruction-Era Mississippi
Southern Cultures (2020)
A "Commercial Emancipation"
for the Negro
Financing Black Business in the 1920s
Financial History Magazine (2019)
“What Price Wholeness?”
Review of From Here to Equality:
Reparations for Black Americans
New York Times Review of Books, 2021
Domesticating Racial Capitalism
Freedwomen in U.S. Industrial Sewing Schools, 1862–1872—An Opening Foray
International Labor & Working-Class History (2022)
“To Do a Work that Would Be Very Far Reaching"
Minnie Geddings Cox and the Mississippi Life Insurance Company
Enterprise & Society (2016)
Getting into Good Debt
Race, Debt, and the
Pursuit of Freedom
Modern American History (2023)
Why Juneteenth Matters
ASALH News
“All the Other Devils
this Side of Hades"
Black Banks in Mississippi
Business History Review (2021)
IMAGE CREDITS: From top, left to right: Andrea Pippins, "Ida B. Wells," flygirlblog.com; Library of Congress, A night-club map of Harlem; collage of images about Evanston, Illinois, reparations; Quilt “Into the Light”; detail from cover of Judge, January 31, 1903; detail from cover of Le Petit Journal, October 7, 1906; Adobe Stock Image; opening of Tri-State Bank, 1946 (Center for Southern Folklore)
© Shennette Garrett-Scott 2026