Fellow Focus: Jeff Williams
2025-26 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Jeff Williams received his PhD from the University of South Carolina and studies the work of local lawyers to advance African American rights beforeBrown v. Board of Educationended legalized segregation in 1954. Following his Fox Center fellowship, Jeff will serve as Assistant Professor of Public Law at New Mexico State University.
In this conversation with Communications & Outreach Coordinator Karl-Mary Akre, Jeff shares how his research on a Jim Crow era lawyer reflects narratives about Black manhood and how his Fox Center fellowship inspired him to radically revise his book project.
KARL-MARY AKRE: Thank you, Jeff, for joining me today. Could you start by telling me more about your journey to your current research project Colored Lawyer, Topeka: The Legend and Legacy of Elisha Scott ?
JEFF WILLIAMS: The project centers on a Jim Crow era African American lawyer from Kansas, and his name is Elisha Scott. I first read about him when I was an undergrad, years ago, in a book called Simple Justice that covers the history of Brown v. Board of Education, and he has this connection to Brown v. Board of Education in that his firm filed the initial claim in Brown. He's from Topeka and an interesting character: he would get into fights and get thrown in jail for contempt and really challenged the system, which seemed different from what I knew about the Jim Crow era and African American lawyers. I just thought that he was really interesting and it was always in my mind; that book was written in the seventies, and nobody really studied him.
I finally figured that if someone was going to do it, it was probably going to be me. That was after I'd gone to law school and had a different career. So then, I thought it was going to be an NAACP story, so I found the person who wrote the book on the NAACP and asked her to accept me as a PhD student. Then, it turned out not to really be an NAACP story, but she was still a really good dissertation chair. The reason that nobody did a project on Elisha earlier was that all his files had burned in a fire. And it's crazy to try to write anything about a lawyer without their files.
How has your experience been trying to excavate his work and his life without access to those archives?
That's the tricky part. He had all these stories about him that kind of made him a legend, so I almost accept that I'm not really telling the true story (not that we ever do), but I accept that this is the legend. The title of the manuscript is “The Life and Legend of Elisha Scott,” because he's lionized in the African American newspapers. The rest of the title is “Colored Lawyer, Topeka,” and that's because he got letters that just said “Colored lawyer, Topeka” from people who had big problems and nowhere else to turn. I know The Topeka Plaindealer was pretty regionally distributed. Kind of like the Chicago Defender goes on trains and goes all over the country and then gets read to people who can't read; The Topeka Plaindealer seems to have done the same thing.
He was lionized by a guy named Nick Chiles, who was the editor. People heard these stories about him challenging white lawyers and winning cases that people didn't think he could win. It became a legend. So that's sort of the frame of it. Almost all of the sources are newspapers. He's in the NAACP papers, some. There turned out to be a few things that survived the fire. It took years to get access to them.
But how Scott is portrayed in the newspaper is definitely a big part of the research. Because that's what’s available. Luckily because there are lots of oral histories of Brown v Board of Education, and he had that connection, people would talk about him, and they wanted to talk about him because he was a foundation builder for African American rights in Kansas and an interesting character.
And how does your research intersect with the Fox Center 2025-26 research theme of Life/Story? Is there a larger phenomena that your examination of Elisha Scott’s life and legend uncovers?
A lot of the scholarship in history is an idea of representation. One of the best books is called Representing the Race, and I got that person to be on my committee because it was his idea that a Jim Crow era lawyer just had to be perfect. The [lawyer’s] tie had to be perfect, and he's absolutely correct. He has all these examples, but then my work changes that a little bit, and part of it is geography. Kansas is not South Carolina or Georgia. Scott had more room to protest, and he did.
One of the chapters [in my monograph] is about him calling Kansas’ bluff. Kansas associates itself with abolitionism and John Brown. John Brown, before he was famous for the raid on Harper's Ferry, was famous for killing people who believed in slavery in Kansas. As another scholar explains it, Kansans connect themselves to that free state narrative. Scott might've been one of the first people to recognize that. In court, he would say, “This African American person, maybe they did commit this crime, but they needed money for their family. And this is John Brown's Kansas.” “People spilled their blood to help African Americans, you’re not going to put this poor guy in jail are you?” I called it calling their bluff. It was him taking advantage of state patriotism. Again, I don't have a lot of sources, but you find those tidbits where he says, “They wouldn't even let this get by in the courts of Arkansas,” when he keeps The Birth of a Nation out of Kansas because he gets the censor board to say they don't want it.
In the larger historiography, it fits with how they were defining Black manhood, because he's made a hero in those African American newspapers. He's about five foot six and 120 pounds, so he's not physically going to intimidate anybody, but he's made a hero in those papers. The historiography also talks about how a black lawyer had to be accepted as white because they're in that white profession, and that really does make sense. But he, again, throws a wrench in those works, because he stomped on the color line.
Your research seems like a mix of excavation and oral history as you uncover how external sources viewed Elisha, specifically, which is fascinating. Given that the Fox Center is an interdisciplinary environment, how do you feel about the role of discipline in your work?
I don't think about it a lot. Because I made this decision to leave another career and had a very specific project that I wanted to do. I always stuck to doing that project. I am almost glad that not everyone in my discipline loves the project, because I think that, as historians, we have these interesting stories to tell, but then we get caught up in our own terminology and write everything for each other. We wonder why the public doesn't take our view, but it's because we don't write things that are accessible.
A big focus for me is to think about the average person who's the reading audience. This book is written for historians and for academics, that's important, but the other audience is my family, people who are just readers who might be interested in something that they're curious about.
That makes a lot of sense. I'm also curious about your fellowship experience and how it's impacted your monograph, the research you're doing. I know you talked about getting more feedback from ethnographers or people in different disciplines that have impacted the process.
It's been awesome. It really has. It is interesting because everyone is at a different stage. The dissertation was two years ago and I've been working on a book manuscript for two years, so I'm further along than some folks. But since I've been here, I figured out that the structure wasn't right at all, and that was by osmosis from just talking to publishers and listening to the way everyone talks about that stuff. So, I've been in my office every day, which is nice, restructuring and rewriting the whole thing to where the chapters are all organized differently.
I know had I not gotten this [fellowship], it would've been a different project and not as good. I'm happy with the new structure. I always say that if you look at me, I might be sitting back in my chair with my feet on the desk, but I'm working pretty hard because I spend a lot of time thinking. In the last few weeks, I've figured out where it all needs to go, and now I'm rewriting and putting all the pieces together.
But otherwise, the environment here has been so helpful. Everyone has different ideas and come from different disciplines, but Carla and Mae really create a collegial environment for us. Their participation sets a good example; they always ask good questions and are just part of the group. Sometimes academics just want to criticize one another or there are personal things, and so you don't get good feedback. That never happens here.
[At the Fox Center], everyone has been so helpful and I'm so happy that they set that tone. It creates a good environment for everyone. And that goes for [the entire Fox Center staff]. All of you have been super nice, and it makes us feel like we're at home, and we belong here, and that we're supported in whatever we want to do. We've got that support, so it's a pretty amazing thing that you do, especially for the postdocs where who knows what we'd be doing, what other opportunity we might have. I feel like this just gave me a chance to rethink the whole thing that I never would have been able to do that.
How have you enjoyed Atlana and Emory so far?
It's been good, I like Atlanta. To be honest, I spend most of my time in a small office. Thinking [in my office] and sort of wandering around the campus. But I've been able to attend a conference, and I've been able to go downtown. I went to a football game and I’ve found some good restaurants. It's been a while since I've lived somewhere this large. So, it's kind of fun to be in a big city. Atlanta and Emory are beautiful.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.