Dr. David Lucander is an assistant professor of pluralism and diversity at Rockland Community College. (Photo courtesy of David Lucander)
But for Lucander, 34, a rising star at Rockland Community College (RCC), which is part of the State University of New York system, the process of putting pen to paper simply requires discipline.
“It’s a real challenge,” says Lucander, who is a tenured assistant professor of pluralism and diversity at the community college located in upstate New York. “You sit down and you got to make time for it. It’s part of doing this work.”
His latest book, Winning the War For Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941-1946 (University of Illinois Press), has been praised by scholars for its ability to focus on the lives of ordinary, everyday individuals who helped to propel the historic March on Washington Movement.
“This is a work of historical recovery that aimed at unearthing the lives of long-forgotten historical actors,” says Lucander, who earned a Ph.D. in 2010 from the W.E.B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
“A. Philip Randolph is something of a household name, while folks like Anna Arnold Hedgeman and Pauli Murray are well-known among historical specialists. People like T.D. McNeal and David Grant, however, are long forgotten, and I’m aiming to bring them into the discussion,” continues Lucander.
“I think it would be fantastic if, with a bit more research, a corpus of knowledge about the 1930s and 1940s could be developed that is on par with what we know about the civil rights movement of later decades.”
