On January 18, 2001, Dr. Karin L. Stanford felt like her world was falling apart.
The media had set up camp outside of her Los Angeles home and stalked her family after civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson confirmed a National Enquirer story that he had fathered a child with Stanford two years earlier.
“I am father to a daughter who was born outside of my marriage,” Jackson said at the time. “I love this child very much and have assumed responsibility for her emotional and financial support since she was born.”
After Jackson’s public admission, old allies turned against Stanford. She was vilified in the media and demonized as a woman out for financial gain.
“I couldn’t trust anyone,” she tells Diverse.
A decade has passed, Stanford has recovered from the humiliating episode and has gone on to emerge as one of the nation’s most prolific Black political scientists. Head of the pan-African studies department at California State University, Northridge, Stanford has authored a handful of scholarly books focused on African-American politics, race, public policy and social movements, including the recently released African Americans in Los Angeles.
“Dr. Stanford is a superb scholar,” says Dr. Charles Jones, founding chairman of the department of African-American studies at Georgia State University and the co-author of an article with Stanford on Black legislative activity in California. “She has a lot of depth in her examination of Black politics.”
