He received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His article, “Jim Crow in the Tri-Cities, 1943-1950” won the Charles Gates Award for the best article published in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly in 2005. His other publications include “The Black Power and Chicano Movements and the Poverty Wars in Los Angeles,” published in the January 2007 Journal of Urban History. He is currently writing a book entitled From Watts to East L.A.: Race and the War on Poverty in Los Angeles, to be published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2008.