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, a MA in history from the University of Washington, and 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 social justice history. Her recent book 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 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, 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 African American History, US Social Justice and Reform Movements, US History Since 1877, Conflict and Creativity in Urban and Suburban History, and Senior Seminar. 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 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 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 US institutions after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, their poor counterparts sunk 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 Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although unintentional, the 1960s and 1970s federal antipoverty policy offered the country’s most economically vulnerable city residents a voice in politics designed for them. My book is now available to readers at libraries and booksellers throughout the United States and reflects my core research interests in African American history, Mexican American history, urban history, and social justice movement history.