Dr. Derrick R. Brooms isn’t quite comfortable with being called a scholar.
“I think of myself as an educational activist,” says Brooms, an assistant professor of sociology at the University
of Louisville. “ At the end of the day, ‘I am because we are.’ I don’t think of myself as a scholar because that’s an individual concept. I don’t think of what I am doing from an ‘I’ perspective, but a ‘we’ perspective.”
Brooms’ research, which trains a spotlight on the educational opportunities of Black males, has caught the attention of established scholars like Drs. James L. Moore III of The Ohio State University and Chance W. Lewis of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who invited Brooms to contribute a chapter to their recent book on African-American males.
“I think he is certainly one of the up and-coming emerging voices focused on African-American males in education,” says Moore. “He brings a nice blend of having practical experience to his scholarship and I think he has a trajectory
that is filled with unlimited potential.”
Brooms’ career path into the academy has been anything but traditional. After graduating from high school, the Chicago native enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he majored in African-American studies and began
engaging with wellknown sociologists like Drs. Mary Pattillo and Al Young.
“They were doing sociology,” says Brooms. “As I learned about their work, it appealed to me in so many ways.”
After graduating from the University of Chicago, Brooms went South to Atlanta, where he took graduate-level classes in African and African-American studies at Clark Atlanta University, with the goal of solidifying his understanding about the history, struggles and triumphs of Africans in America and throughout the Diaspora.
