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Join us for a conversation about Tikia K. Hamilton's book Nothing Less Than Equality, a critical analysis of African Americans’ collective efforts to obtain educational equality before Brown v. Board of Education. Tikia will be in conversation with David Stovall.

Tikia K. Hamilton is an Assistant Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, where her research and courses focus on U.S. and African American History. Dr. Hamilton holds a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and a masters in African American Studies from Columbia University. She attended Dartmouth College, where she majored in History under a Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship, which served as a launchpad for her academic career. Dr. Hamilton has lengthy experience teaching at the secondary and undergraduate levels and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Spencer Fellowship from the National Academy of Education and Loyola’s Gannon Faculty Fellowship. She recently worked as a consultant for the DC History Center's exhibit Class Action: Education and Opportunity in the Nation's Capital, which will remain open until 2030. Earlier this year, she appeared on the local Chicago affiliates for CBS and PBS, and in 2025, where she spoke about the Great Migration. And in 2025, she was named as one of "Top 40 Women Making a Difference in Academe" by Diversity: Issues in Higher Education. She also operates Triple Ivy Writing and Educational Solutions and, is in the preliminary stages of researching her second book on an important Washington, D.C. Educator.

David Stovall is a professor in the departments of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The breadth of his scholarship concerns Critical Race Theory, the relationship between housing and education, and the intersection of race, place and school. He earned a BA in History, a Master's in Educational Policy Studies, and a Ph.D. In Educational Policies all from the University of Champaign Urbana. He has written several books, including Born Out of Struggle: Critical Race Theory, School Creation, and the Politics of Interruption and, more recently, Engineered Conflict: Structural Violence and the Future of Black Life in Chicago, which explores how working-class Black communities have organized to combat state policies designed to displace them through capitalist and white supremacist agendas, including through school closings. He has worked with community organizations and schools to address issues of equity, justice and abolishing the school/prison nexus, including his work as a member of the design team for the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice (SOJO) and the Peoples Education Movement, a collection of classroom teachers, community members, students and university professors in Chicago, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. He also served as a volunteer social studies teacher at the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice from 2005-2018.