Tameka Bradley Hobbs is a historian, educator, author, and activist. She currently serves as the Library Regional Manager of Broward County Library's African American Research Library and Cultural Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.[1] She previously served as associate provost of Florida Memorial University and the founding director of the FMU Social Justice Institute think tank and research center. She is the author of the 2015 history book Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida.[2]
Early life and education
Hobbs was raised in Live Oak, Florida.[3][4] While an undergraduate at Florida A&M University, Hobbs was inspired by an African American history course to shift the focus of her studies from business to history,[2] and graduated with a B.A. in history.[5] She became interested in becoming an oral historian after speaking with her grandfather about his experience living in Live Oak, and his recollections of the lynching of Willie James Howard in Live Oak,[3][6] and then focused her research while a graduate student at Florida State University on the history of racial violence in Florida.[7]
Hobbs completed her master's degree and PhD at Florida State University.[5] Her 2000 master's thesis was titled "Lynched Twice: The Murder of A.C. Williams", and the title of her 2004 dissertation is "Hitler is Here: Lynching in Florida during the Era of World War II."[6][8]
In 2020, as associate provost at Florida Memorial University, Hobbs became the founding director of the FMU Social Justice Institute, a think tank and research center focused on systemic racism in Florida.[2][14] When the US Congress considered making lynching a federal crime in 2020, Hobbs spoke with The New York Times about people who lack of awareness of the historical magnitude of violence motivated by racism in the United States, and stated, "I think if they understood that, perhaps they would understand the Black Lives Matter movement as an extension of centuries, really, of advocacy on the part of African-Americans."[15]
In 2022, Hobbs served as the inaugural executive director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute for Law, Race, Social Justice, and Economic Policy at Edward Waters University.[16]
Works
Hobbs, Tameka Bradley; Guzmán, William (2000). Landmarks and Legacies: A Guide to Tallahassee's African American Heritage, 1865-1968. John G. Riley Center/Museum. ISBN9780996785235.
Fortune, T. Thomas; Weinfeld, Daniel R.; Herd-Clark, Dawn J.; Hobbs, Tameka Bradley (2014). After War Times: An African American Childhood in Reconstruction-Era Florida. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. ISBN9780817387679.[17]
^Michael J. Pfeifer (October 4, 2016). "Review of Tameka Bradley Hobbs. Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida". The American Historical Review. 121 (4). American Historical Association: 1309–1310. doi:10.1093/ahr/121.4.1309. Archived from the original on September 17, 2021. Retrieved September 16, 2021. Throughout her narrative and especially in a powerful epilogue, Hobbs provides a highly valuable analysis of the effects of the four lynchings on the families of the lynching victims as well as on local black communities. For the families and descendants of lynching victims, migration and broken family relationships often ensued, as did painful silences; for the larger African American community in localities, oral histories reconstructed events in instrumentalist ways that stressed the dangerously unjust ways of white supremacy.
