Home > . > Harambee Digital Team

Harambee Digital Team

Nishani Frazier is a Professor of History at North Carolina State University (NCSU). Prior to NCSU University, she held positions as Associate Curator of African American History and Archives at Western Reserve Historical Society, Assistant to the Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Archives at the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and personal assistant for Dr. John Hope Franklin, before and during his tenure as chair of President Bill Clinton's advisory board on "One America". She recently completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Norway.

Her research interests include 1960s freedom movements, oral history, food, digital humanities, and black economic development. Nishani’s recent book publication, Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism, was released in 2017. Frazier’s other writings include: “To Die For the People: Prophecy and Death in the Rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton" in Homegoings, Crossings, and Passings: Life and Death in the African Diaspora; "Building a Black Nation: CORE, Black Power, and the Community Development Corporation Movement” in The New Black History; and “A McDonald’s That Reflects the Soul of a People: McDonald’s Corporation, Operation Black Unity, Hough Area Development Corporation, and Black Economic Empowerment” in The Business of Black Power.

Although Frazier’s academic work centers on 1960s black economic development, her personal background began with hands on observation and service for Southeast Raleigh Community Development Corporation in North Carolina. Southeast Raleigh CDC worked to revitalize its target community of low- and moderate-income African-American households by countering the interrelated problems of poverty, unemployment, affordable housing, lacking preservation of cultural identity, and racism. Over its life, the organization constructed moderate-income homes, trained high school dropouts in construction trades, provided daycare services, and helped other nonprofit organizations throughout North Carolina via shared ideas, training, and workshops. Notably, Southeast Raleigh CDC came to be heavily influenced by the past economic development activities of black activists featured in Frazier’s book Harambee City.

You can follow her on Twitter at @SpelmanDiva.

Markus Wust is a librarian at North Carolina State University Libraries where he works with faculty and students on utilizing technology for their teaching and research. As part of that, he has worked with platforms such as DSpace and Omeka as well as mobile and augmented reality technologies, evaluated and implemented new software tools, provided support for high-tech visualization spaces, and managed the Libraries' first digital publishing project. He holds Master's degrees in German Literature, Library and Information Studies, and Humanities Computing.

Elias Tzoc, Digital Scholarship and Associate Librarian, assists the head of the Center for Digital Scholarship to support the creation and use of digital scholarship at Miami University. His recent work includes: serving as co-PI for two grant-funded projects: 2015 IMLS Sparks and 2014 NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up; co-developing a profile module for DSpace; working with faculty and students in developing web-based projects; evaluating captioning best practices for educational videos; documenting and writing on library technical issues and open source software; and implementing several web-customization projects for systems like DSpace, CONTENTdm, Omeka, OJS, WordPress -using PHP, CSS, XML, XSLT, HTML5, jQuery.

Lindsey Masters is a graduate of the University of Mount Union, where she double majored in Media Computing and Japanese. She has an extensive background in digital media and has worked as a tutor with elementary and high school students learning English as a second language. She is currently employed at Miami University as a SR Library Technician in the Center for Digital Scholarship.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project has been supported by North Carolina State University's Digital Humanities Initiative and George Mason University's Center for Digital Scholarship. Special Thanks to Tonya Taylor and Dr. Robyn Spencer for their editorial suggestions for Harambee City Digital Archives and Website.