Faculty Profile for Dr. Casey Darcel Nichols

Biography Section

Biography and Education

Dr. Casey D. Nichols is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Texas State University. She holds a BA in history from California State University, Long Beach, an MA from the University of Washington, and a PhD in history from Stanford University. Before starting at Texas State in the Fall of 2019, Dr. Nichols taught at CSU-East Bay, CSU-Long Beach, and Dickinson College. As a historian, she specializes in African American history, Mexican American history, urban history, civil rights history, and policy history. Her recent book with the University of North Carolina Press titled, Poverty Rebels: Black and Brown Protest in Post-Civil Rights America, examines post-1964 antipoverty policy with a specific focus on how these policies shaped African American and Mexican American social justice movements in Los Angeles and brought new significance to Black-Brown relations as US racial paradigm. Her Pacific Historical Review (PHR) article titled, "'The Magna Carta to Liberate Our Cities': African Americans, Mexican Americans, and the Model Cities Program in Los Angeles," was published in the Summer of 2021. This article examines the impact of the Chicano Movement on the US federal government's Model Cities Program. Dr. Nichols has received several competitive grants, including the Emerging Poverty Scholar Fellowship from the Institute for Research on Poverty, a Liberal Arts Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Moody Research Grant from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Foundation, the E. Peter Mauk, Jr./Doyce B. Nunis, Jr. Fellowship from the Huntington Library, and a project development grant from The Policy Academies.

Teaching Interests

I teach courses in African American History, US Social Justice and Reform Movements, US History 1877 to Date, Conflict and Creativity in Urban and Suburban History, and Senior Seminar. Engaging Texas State University's largely first-generation, economically diverse, and underrepresented students in history courses and instructing them in how to think historically are central to my teaching philosophy. I accomplish these goals by assigning both primary and secondary sources that represent a critical range of human experiences and perspectives. Teaching students with primary sources enables them to consider time, space, and complexity of experience as they cultivate historical thinking skills, an approach to teaching that reflects my department’s emphasis on critical analysis, writing, and speaking.

Research Interests

My first book, Poverty Rebels: Black and Brown Protest in Post-Civil Rights America, examines the implementation of the War on Poverty and Model Cities programs in Los Angeles between 1964 and 1979. Poverty Rebels argues that for poor and working-class African American and Mexican American residents of Los Angeles, antipoverty policies offered a source of political power after 1964. While middle-class Black Americans and Mexican Americans earned some access to US institutions after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, their poor counterparts sank deeper into economic uncertainty. I argue that antipoverty policy, including the Economic Opportunity Act and Metropolitan Development and Demonstration Cities Act, provided working-class and poor residents with legislative infrastructure to critique the nation’s failure to acknowledge the role of class in shaping who had access to new opportunities made available through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although unintentional, 1960s and 1970s federal antipoverty policy offered the country’s most economically vulnerable city residents a voice in local politics. My book is now available to readers through libraries, bookstores, and online vendors throughout the United States.