Harmony and Harassment traces the headwaters of critical race theory (CRT) to the rural community of Harmony, Mississippi, at the height of the 1960s US civil rights movement. As Aja Y. Martinez and Robert O. Smith explore these headwaters, readers meet key community leaders like Behonor McDonald, Winson Hudson, and Dovie Hudson. These Black women's activism for civil rights, voting rights, and educational access transformed their community while also providing the foundations for Derrick Bell's legal theories, Alice Walker's womanist concept, and the enduring educational program now known as Head Start. Building on extensive archival research and a web of deeply human relationships, Martinez and Smith argue for renewed appreciation of the centrality of counterstories to CRT itself. Harmony and Harassment shows how CRT developed from the ground up; from this foundation, its insights continue to hold great potential for strengthening education, legal studies, and the humanities and social sciences.

About the Author

Aja Y. Martinez is Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author of the multi-award-winning book Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory, now in its second edition.

Robert O. Smith (Chickasaw) is Vice President and Dean of Academic Affairs at Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and author of More Desired Than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism.

Together, Martinez and Smith are coauthors of The Origins of Critical Race Theory: The People and Ideas That Created a Movement.