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. 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 the areas of African American history, Mexican American history, U.S. Urban history, Civil Rights history, and Social Justice history. Her current book project under contract with the University of North Carolina Press, "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 activist movements in Los Angeles and brought new significance to Black-Brown relations as U.S. 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 and examines the impact of the Chicano Movement on the U.S. federal government's Model Cities Program. Dr. Nichols has received several honors, including an Emerging Poverty Scholars fellowship, a Liberal Arts Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Moody Research Grant from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Foundation, and a research fellowship from the Huntington Library. In the classroom, Dr. Nichols is deeply invested in connecting history to social justice and teaching US history from the perspective of diverse actors.

Teaching Interests

I teach courses in African American history, US Social Justice and Reform Movements, and US History Since 1877. Engaging diverse students in history courses and instructing students on how to think historically are central to my teaching philosophy. I accomplish these goals by assigning both primary and secondary sources that represent a diversity of human experiences and perspectives. Teaching students with primary sources enables them to consider time, space, and diversity of experience as they cultivate historical thinking skills, which is an approach to teaching that reflects my department’s emphasis on critical analysis and can appeal to our majority-minority student population.

Research Interests

My book manuscript in progress, "Poverty Rebels: African American and Mexican American Protest in Post-Civil Rights America," examines the implementation of the War on Poverty and Model Cities Program in Los Angeles between 1964 and 1975. "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 access to U.S. institutions after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, their poor counterparts sunk deeper into economic uncertainty. However, I argue that antipoverty policy 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 after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. Although unintentional, the 1960s and 1970s antipoverty policy offered the country’s most vulnerable city residents a voice. This project reflect my core research interests in African American history, Mexican American history, and U.S. Social Justice history.