A talk from Dr. Jayme Canty-Williams in celebration of Frederick Douglass Day 2025. 

Dr. Jayme Canty (she/her) is a humanities scholar and oral history scholar who amplifies marginalized voices in her research, teaching, and activist service. She is an intersectional humanities scholar-activist with a focus on the experiences of Black women and Black queer persons living in or from the American South. Her work intends to humanize the experiences of marginalized Southern Black persons.

Her research focuses on the collective narrative of how the American South shapes and molds the experiences of Southern Black queer lesbian women and persons. She has presented at several conferences about her research, such as Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies South (WGS South), National Council of Black Studies (NCBS), and National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). In 2022, she was appointed as a board member of WGS South, working as the Black Indigenous Persons of Color (BIPOC) Caucus chair. Her current research chronicles the collective narrative of Southern Black queer lesbian women and gender non-conforming persons, uncovering how the American (US) South, particularly the Christian Black Church, shapes and molds their lived experiences. Her forthcoming manuscript, Snapping Beans: Voices of a Black Queer Lesbian South, outlines the ways the South informs their intersectional identities.

She is currently a professor at her alma mater, Clark Atlanta University.