Dr. Norrece Jones

Associate professor, African American studies and history

Contact information

912 W Franklin St, rm 204
PO Box 842001
Richmond, VA 23284-2001
(804) 828-9814
(804) 828-7085 fax
ntjones@vcu.edu

Education

PhD (1981) in American history, Northwestern University

Biographical statement

Dr. Norrece Jones, Jr., a specialist in African American history, is a product of the Philadelphia public schools, Hampton University, and Northwestern University. Although raised in the urban North, he spent summers with four generations of family in the rural South. He began his career at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts and left to join the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University in 1983. Frequently invited to speak on the African American experience, he has appeared on Good Morning America and was featured prominently in the four-part documentary, “Africans in America,” a production of WGBH in Boston that aired nationally on PBS in 1998 as well as the 2005 series, Slavery and the Making of America. An avid supporter of the arts and both cultural and historical institutions, Dr. Jones served on the Multicultural Advisory Committee to the director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the board of the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, and was a commissioner on Richmond’s Public Art Commission.

Research interests

Dr. Jones’ primary areas of expertise are African American history and African American studies, with a special focus on slavery and the dynamics of social control. He has always maintained, however, a strong interest in African history, a secondary field that he pursued at Northwestern University. His book, “Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina,” was published in 1990 by Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England. He currently is under contract with Blackwell Publishers for “Slavery and Antislavery: Race and Freedom Struggles in the Making of America,” a forthcoming volume in its Problems in American History Series. Dr. Jones has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation and the National Fellowships Fund.

During the 1997-98 academic year, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Houston in Texas. In 2000, Dr. Jones was one of the six scholars selected by historian Winthrop Jordan to deliver a lecture in the twenty-fifth Porter L. Fortune, Jr. Symposium at the University of Mississippi. His topic, “Rape in Black and White: Sexual Violence in the Testimony of Enslaved and Free Americans,” was published in a volume, Slavery and the American South, edited by Dr. Jordan. Jones has published in The Journal of Southern History, Southern Studies, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, and has contributed chapters to a number of monographs and anthologies.

Representative publications

“Exhibition Review: America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics after the Civil War,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 104 (Summer, 1996), 402-403.

Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1990.

“Rape in Black and White: Sexual Violence in the Testimony of Enslaved and Free Americans” in Winthrop Jordan, ed. Slavery and the American South. Jackson, MS: The University of Mississippi Press, 2003, 93-108.

“Slave Religion in South Carolina – A Heaven or Hell?” Southern Studies 1 (Spring, 1990), 5-32.

“The Threat of Sale: The Black Family as a Mechanism of Planter Control” in William Harris, ed. Society and Culture in the Antebellum South. New York: Routledge, 1992, 162-187.

Recent courses

Recent award