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Did the Work

4 courses. Start with the first one, then take whichever of the 2 tracks you want: they run in parallel, and none of them needs another.

How to read the course codes
  • -00 means start here.
  • -01, -02 are steps on one path, in order.
  • A letter (-T1, -P2) marks a track. Tracks run in parallel: take any track you like, in any order, without taking the others.
  • -99 is the capstone. Take it last.

She Did the Work track

  1. DIDWORK-SHE1

    She Took the Seat and Held the Door

    Step 1 of the She Did the Work track. Tracks run in parallel: you can take this one without taking the others.

    Twelve women who got into sports media and stayed, and what their careers teach anyone trying to enter a closed profession. Not a hall of fame. A study of mechanisms: the trial contract, the credential stack, the pipeline program, the non-linear resume, and the road knowledge nobody writes down. It is precise about firsts, because a course about who was first is worthless if it gets the ordinals wrong, and lesson 3 teaches you to check one yourself. It is equally precise about what came after: several of the twelve are no longer with the organization that hired them, and a course that shows only the hiring press release is lying to its students. Cited to network bios, hall-of-fame records, honours lists and contemporaneous reporting, APA 7 throughout.

  2. DIDWORK-SHE2

    The Editor of The Crisis

    Step 2 of the She Did the Work track. Tracks run in parallel: you can take this one without taking the others.

    Jessie Redmon Fauset ran the literary pages of The Crisis from October 1919 to April 1926. She took the first poem Langston Hughes published outside his high school magazine, ran Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer and Arna Bontemps, and kept the rooms where those writers met each other. Hughes later named her one of three people who midwifed the New Negro literature into being. The movement is remembered by name; she is remembered as staff. This course is about why, and it is about editorial work rather than about a life: what an acquiring editor actually does, why none of it leaves a byline, and how credit for a movement travels to whoever signed the poems. It is built on the magazine itself, read issue by issue, because the masthead settles a tenure that every secondary account rounds off, and it separates writers she is documented to have acquired from writers who merely appeared while she was there, because those are different claims and the record does not settle both. Her four novels are the control case: she did have a byline, and is still barely read, so this course refuses the tidy story that erasure explains everything. Where the evidence is genuinely argued, it teaches the argument and names who holds which position.

  3. DIDWORK-SHE3

    Shirley Graham Wrote the Opera First

    Step 3 of the She Did the Work track. Tracks run in parallel: you can take this one without taking the others.

    A composer, playwright, biographer and organizer taught in the order she built things, which means the opera comes first and the 1951 marriage to W. E. B. Du Bois arrives in lesson 15 as one fact among several. Her opera was staged in a Cleveland stadium in 1932 while she was still an undergraduate. The Federal Theatre put her in charge of a unit. She wrote a shelf of biographies for young readers, won prizes for them, and worked in a genre whose liberties with fact are worth arguing about. She organized, was surveilled, lost her passport, moved to Ghana, helped start a television service, and took Ghanaian citizenship. The course is precise about what the record supports and blunt about what it does not: the unqualified claim that she wrote the first opera by a Black woman is downgraded to the narrowest version the sources carry, four widely repeated details about the 1932 premiere are named as wrong, and what could not be settled is filed as an open source check rather than smoothed over. Cited to archives, contemporaneous press and the scholarly literature, APA 7 throughout.

He Did the Work track

  1. DIDWORK-HIM1

    How the NAACP Learned to Win

    Step 1 of the He Did the Work track. Tracks run in parallel: you can take this one without taking the others.

    Five men, five instruments, and the slowest successful campaign in American civic history. W. E. B. Du Bois built a press so the facts existed. James Weldon Johnson built a branch network and aimed it at Congress, where it lost. Walter White went and got the evidence nobody would give him, and used it to beat a Supreme Court nomination. Charles Hamilton Houston designed a ladder of precedents and trained the lawyer who climbed it, and Thurgood Marshall argued thirty-two cases before the Supreme Court and won twenty-nine of them. This is a course about organizational strategy told through five careers: what each instrument can do, what it cannot, what a losing campaign still buys, and why the litigation everyone remembers only worked because the other three came first. Cited to the case reporters, the Senate's own record, the digitized Crisis, and named historians, APA 7 throughout.