Myisha S. Eatmon

Myisha S. Eatmon is a tenure-track assistant professor in African and African American studies and history at Harvard University. She is trained in US, African American, and legal history. Her manuscript in progress is tentatively titled “Litigating in Black and White: Black Legal Culture(s), White Violence, and Tort Law.”

At Radcliffe, Eatmon is finishing her book “Litigating in Black and White,” which explores what she calls Black legal culture, legal networking, vernacular legal education, and how Black people used civil or private law to challenge white violence during Jim Crow. A second book, which Eatmon hopes to begin at Radcliffe, examines the legal relationship between Black Americans and American Jews during the Holocaust and Jim Crow.

Eatmon holds a PhD from Northwestern University and received the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. As an American Society of Legal History member, Eatmon was selected a Hurst Fellow, a Kathryn T. Preyer Fellow, a Wallace Johnson First Book Program Fellow. She was also a William Nelson Cromwell Early Career Scholar Fellow. Eatmon has a forthcoming article in the Journal of American History, “Wielding an Unlikely Weapon: Black Americans, White Violence, and Damage Suits During the Early Days of Jim Crow.” She is also the author of “Jim Crow Then, Jim Crow Now: Police Violence, Tort Law, and Black Resistance in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,” in The Civil War and the Summer of 2020 (Fordham University Press, 2024), edited by Hilary N. Green and Andrew L. Slap.