About CJ Martin

CJ Martin is a PhD candidate in UMass Amherst’s W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. His dissertation, Our Earnest Remonstrance: Citizenship, Voting, and Providence’s Black Community, 1770-1843, analyzes antebellum Providence’s Black leaders and their struggles against the implementation of the color line in the rights of citizenship. He recently published an article entitled “‘Forever and Hereafter a Body Politic’: The African Union Meeting House and Providence’s First Black Leaders” in Rhode Island History, vol. 77, no. 1 (Summer-Fall 2019). A graduate of Assumption College (BA in History) and UMass Boston (MA in Creative Writing and MA in History), CJ teaches courses across the spectrum of African American history at UMass and lives in Uxbridge, Massachusetts.