Associate Professor Louis Moore (History and affiliated with African/African American Studies) researches and teaches about subjects of perennial relevance and, this year, a kind of incandescent topicality: African American History, Sports History, and Gender History.

His two recent books I Fight for a Living (University of Illinois Press, 2017) and We Will Win the Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest For Equality (Praeger, 2017) landed almost simultaneously. He has been quoted in everything from major sports publications to NPR. He has written for online outlets such as The Shadow League, Vox, and Vocativ; and has a lecture series on Audible as part of the Great Courses entitled, African American Athletes Who Made History. He has a podcast called The Black Athlete. He is on Twitter at @loumoore12. In short, his scholarly engagement reaches far beyond the scholarly audience.

Louis takes history to a public that is usually not familiar with it and sometimes embraces a naïve narrative of sporting legends such as Jack Johnson, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, and Serena Williams. While his work is often myth shattering, it may be more
accurate to say that Louis restores the actual complexity of the context in which these athletes contributed to a strong counternarrative to Jim Crow and other retrograde forces in both their sporting and civic lives. He revives their voices and dimensionality and does so engagingly.

And he is teaching this kind of engagement to his students. He talked about it in a July 2020 interview via Zoom. “It’s important to bring current events into the classroom. A few weeks ago, Juneteenth became a hot topic for about a week. A University of Kentucky professor and I co-host podcasts on sports and addressed Juneteenth and within days, that was their most popular podcast,” Louis observes. “People are hungry for this information. Turn students on to current events.”

His recommendation of the role of current events in a history class does not end with his discipline. “If you are in biomedical sciences, it’s the time to talk about Spanish influenza, yellow fever as well as COVID. Bring the now into the classroom.”

He also embraces new channels of dissemination, shorter article lengths, and even the sort of citation that is in demand in the channels he uses. While he teaches time-honored academic writing and citation, he also encourages his students to learn to write 1,000 -word pieces (that use links as their primary form of citation) about what they have learned in order to learn to write for a public audience and be prepared for the many online outlets that make use of these short forms.

In addition to short written pieces, Louis understands the power of visuals. He makes story maps for the public. “They take you from point A to B on the map.

For the 100th anniversary of the Jack Johnson vs. John Jeffries fight, I made a story map. People can use them in the classroom. Take what you do in the classroom and share it with everybody else,” Louis recommends.

“Sports are very public. I try to write for an academic to appreciate it and for the public to buy it,” he states. He sees his blog writing as a way for academics to talk to people outside the academy. “That’s why I am asked by all these outlets that need this history.”
His own activity in the public arena helps students see that need for history, too.

Louis notes that these shorter forms line up well with research about student attention spans. “This is the world we live in. Students want their lectures in 7-minute chunks. They want their reading in smaller chunks—and may be viewing my course readings on
their phones.”

Louis knows that the topics he will be teaching can be uncomfortable subjects for some. In upper division classes, race is clearly in the title. Every student knows in advance that race will be central. “Not every student comes in comfortable with talking about it. You
have to tell students, ‘we are going to talk about these things and it is part of growing up’.”

In his lower division course, a U.S. survey (1877 to present), he introduces students to the idea that race and gender are part of history. “You have to incorporate it. This term, there will be more conversations on diseases and monuments. Faculty
have to be prepared.”

As his Audible lectures illustrate beautifully, sports do not take place in in a vacuumꟷ war, immigration, civil rights are all key factors. Louis uses sports history as a window to look at these things.

Louis says, “Audible is an example of how people are hungry for this stuff. People want and need to learn. I can have these hard conversations through sports.”

“There were great discussions online in my last class—everybody had to do it. No hiding. Some don’t hold back in ways they might check themselves in the classroom in front of people,” Louis observes.

“As professors we have an opportunity to change and do a lot of great teaching. The information we give our students on these current challenges, they will remember. They will be hungry to learn. The world is changing quickly around them, and they want to make sense of it. Plus, there is the election in November.”

All of Louis’ fall courses will be online: civil rights, American identity in sport, two surveys of 1877 to present. Like many other faculty members, he is currently in the midst of making videos of his lectures. He’s asking himself about the material, “How do I chop
it up?” into accessible chunks. He’s collecting relevant podcasts, good documentaries, and shorter articles to supplement his
lectures.

He hopes that as part of this cultural moment that GVSU will be open to accelerating hiring or doing a cluster hire to address our demographics, to creating a social justice major or certificate from existing courses in grant writing, history, WGS, Political Science, etc. He is a historian actively imagining ways forward.

“October is going to be rough—we need to have conversations. It’s going to be about race,” Louis predicts. “We’ve all been reading and thinking.”

A puppy and child enter the room and accidentally join the Zoom interview like a reminder that sometimes history is entwined with the future that we are in the midst of making right now.