Walter Stern

Walter C. Stern is Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies and History at University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research examines intersections between racism, state action, and ordinary people’s lives in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, with a focus on public schools and the metropolitan South. He is the author of Race & Education in New Orleans: Creating the Segregated City, 1764-1960, which received the 2018 Williams Prize for the best book on Louisiana history. His current book project explores the criminalization of Black youth during the desegregation era and the role that school officials, police, prosecutors, legislators, and judges played in that process. This project focuses on the case of Gary Tyler, a Black teenager who was imprisoned for nearly 42 years after being wrongfully convicted of fatally shooting a white student at their desegregating Louisiana high school in 1974.