Say Burgin a 20th century historian of the United States with specializations in radical politics, social movements, gender and African American history.
Her book Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit offers the first comprehensive analysis of how white activists in the 1960s and 1970s responded to Black Power’s mandate for white people to organize in white communities. It debunks the myth that Black Power “purged” white people from the freedom struggle, showing instead that it innovated a strategy Burgin calls “racially parallel organizing.” Organizing Your Own delves into Detroit’s Black Power experiments to reveal a range of ways that white activists worked in parallel to foster support for Black self-determination among white people.
Burgin’s award-winning research on race, gender and post-war social movements appears in numerous scholarly publications including the Journal of American Studies, Women’s History Review, and the Journal of Civil and Human Rights. In 2023, she won the Ronald T. and Gayla D. Farrar Award in Media & Civil Rights History from the University of South Carolina for her research on news media and the myth of Black Power as “anti-white.”
Burgin works against the notion that the “academic” and the “public” are two different audiences or constituencies. Oral history sits at the heart of her research. She collaborates with educators at the primary, secondary, and higher education levels to create open-access curriculum. And she regularly condenses her research findings in short pieces for popular platforms like the Washington Post, Black Perspectives, and The Nation.
Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of History at Dickinson College and resides in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.