Please welcome Dr. Erica Sterling, Curator for Class Action, an exhibit opening at the DC History Center in summer 2025.
Class Action will explore how the activism of DC’s Black communities led to better education opportunities for their children. This activism ultimately led to Bolling v Sharpe, the 1954 companion case to Brown v Board of Education.
Erica is a scholar of Black educational history whose research agenda explores questions of access, equity, and power, and who views history and public policy as inextricably linked.
Erica researches and teaches in the History Department at the University of Virginia, where she is a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow. In the spring, her class “Race, Place, and the Schoolhouse” introduced undergraduates to the many ways Black communities pursued educational justice in the 20th century in the midst of people, policies, and institutions that perpetuate inequality. Her in-progress book manuscript examines local and federal education politics in Washington, DC from 1954 to the 1994 introduction of the federal charter school program. She interrogates the ways in which a variety of stakeholders pursued and experimented with innovative ways to cultivate equitable K-12 schooling in a large urban school system. Her research has been supported by multiple entities, including the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation.
Erica holds her BA in History and Psychology from Emory University. She earned her PhD in History from Harvard University in May 2022. A native Californian with Jamaican roots, Erica lives in Trinidad with her husband, who teaches Biology to Freshmen at McKinley Technology High School.