An author and expert in African American Studies, UNLV's Tyler D. Parry is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

♪♪♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

Born and raised in Las Vegas, his career plans dramatically changed when he attended UNLV.

His work you can read in publications like The Journal of African American History and The Washington Post.

Tyler D. Parry, Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at UNLV, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

(Tyler D. Parry) Thank you.

It's an honor to be here.

-Let's start with that change in career path in UNLV.

When was that and what happened?

-Yeah, I'll try to make this a relatively shorter story of a longer one.

But I would say that I had ambitions to go into some form of broadcasting or communications, and it made sense for me when I entered UNLV to declare that as my initial major.

But my career trajectory really changed around my third year at the university.

I had always liked history, but formal patterns of education rarely interested me, and I didn't really understand what a historian did.

But I took a history class my third year called Comparative Slavery.

By that point, I had started to gravitate toward history as a major.

And the professor, whose name was Kevin Dawson, taught us a way to approach historical subjects, particularly of oppressed people, from a completely different perspective, prioritizing the way they thought, the way they felt, the way they resisted, the way they interacted with each other.

And it was very much a humanizing way of investigating the historical process.

And so from that point, I decided that I was going to pursue some form of a profession in the historical field.

What did that mean at the time, I wasn't entirely sure.

Maybe I could go to law school, maybe I could teach K-12, but there was this pathway toward graduate school becoming a professor, and I really leaned on him and a few other faculty within the department of the history program, just asking questions as to what the process looks like.

You know, what do you do to get a PhD, for instance.

How do you get funded?

Do you have to pay for this?

Those were the questions I initially asked.

And so I switched from Communications, still a love of mine in some form of broadcasting.

-Look at you now.

You're broadcasting.

-Yes, I'm still doing it in some capacity, but yeah, no regrets.

I feel I ended up where I needed to be at that point.

-Well, and you recently won a prestigious award, Alumni of the Year Award from the University Libraries.

And UNLV wrote an article on you as a result of that.

In it, you mentioned that when you were considering changing to history, you were really interested in how communities shape people.

So I want to know, how did Las Vegas shape you?

-When you're raised in a place that feels normal to you.

So I was born in the mid '80s, and this is when I think Las Vegas was really asserting itself as a premier international city.

Tourism was booming.

Every year it seemed like a new casino was being built.

The Strip was always changing.

And so for me, interacting with people from various backgrounds, being introduced to new people every year who had just moved to the city, it was a pretty normal aspect of my experience.

But I think in retrospect, it really did shape kind of how I perceived both myself as a member of a community and how communities are formed across cultural boundaries to some degree and how people can interact with each other and come to understandings.

And there's an aspect of camaraderie that emerges from that particular process when you approach things with an open mind.

So you know, the people I'd met, the foods I'd eaten, the types of cultural performances that I'd been privy to being raised in an increasingly diverse urban space, I think was crucial to the way that I approached graduate study and also the way I interacted with people throughout the profession as I began my career.

-So instrumental.

Las Vegas was instrumental in who you've become, but how big of a role did it play in moving out of state?

-Yeah.

I have kind of a unique experience in this regard, because I had just gotten married by the time I graduated with my BA in history.

I met my wife at UNLV.

We both took an elective class together, and, you know, long story short, ended up getting married.

-In Theater you told me nonetheless.

-Yeah, Introduction to Theater course.

It was just an elective that both of us randomly chose, and we happened to live on the same side of town.

One thing about my university experience is that I was one of the local kids that decided to stay home to go to university.

Millennium Scholarship made things very cheap.

I lived with my mom and dad and worked while I went to UNLV to kind of avoid getting into too much debt.

So my wife did something similar.

And so there was a certain, you know, we were simpatico in that regard.

But once I received the notice that I got into graduate school at the University of South Carolina-- and I had nothing against South Carolina.

It's just not where I thought I would end up.

I thought, you know, being born and raised in this particular city, why leave?

Everything's here.

Everything that I needed was here.

But to go to graduate school, I needed to go do something else.

I need to go to a different department to get my advanced degree.

And University of South Carolina not only said yes, but they said they would fund that.

So it made sense to me to go.

But, you know, doing that, now uprooting both of us who, really, Vegas was what both of us knew the best, going to a place where we didn't have any family, no relatives, no sense of even what it was going to be like.

We had our assumptions about what the South was, but that was more based upon never having interacted with a lot of people from there.

But going into South Carolina, and particularly studying history there, gave me kind of, I think, a nuanced perspective of what it means to live in a place with kind of that form of history, but also history that extends back all the way to the American Revolution.

You start to meet people who have kind of different perspectives on how they view the past, but also people who are working to actively revise the assumptions that people have about the past.

What I mean by that is, for me, South Carolina represented really what I think is the best of black activism and how people work to change the status quo.

So if you approach a place with a preconceived notion that there's nothing of value for you to learn from there, I think you do yourself a disservice.

And I think coming from Las Vegas and having interacted with people from all walks of life helped to kind of prepare me to take a place on its own terms, but also find that more subversive aspect of its history that you can really appreciate for those people that, against all odds, worked to change a place for the better.

-What is it about the activism in South Carolina that stood out to you?

-Well, I mean, you're talking about a place that had very overt Jim Crow laws.

So not only was South Carolina the seabed of the Confederacy, the place that started the Civil War, it also had very fierce forms of racial segregation, racial violence that occurred, but you also have community members who, despite living under conditions that most younger people would have a hard time fathoming, they worked to change it.

They took people to court.

They marched peacefully on streets when they could have been beaten and brutalized.

Many of them were jailed.

And I was able to actually meet a lot of people who were a part of that.

This living history aspect was really cool to me, and it really informed even the way I was approaching my own scholarship.

You know, whose voices am I prioritizing, whose stories still need to be told, and on what terms can I responsibly tell them?

And so I think interacting with that landscape in South Carolina not only informed my own perceptions of self, but also my perceptions as a scholar and researcher.

-Let's talk about the stories you've been able to tell.

Your first book, Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual, what is that about?

-Well, so the origins of the book, so before I describe the ritual, I'll tell you kind of how it formed.

When I was actually getting engaged and married, my wife and I talked about, what is the wedding going to look like?

What is the ceremony going to look like?

What are some of the traditions that we want to do?

One of them she wanted to do was jumping the broom, which, for those that don't know, is a popular wedding custom amongst-- primarily associated with African Americans, in which people jump over a broom in homage to their ancestors who jumped over a broomstick for their own wedding services, largely because there were few other options for them to utilize.

So you're thinking of enslaved people jumping over broomsticks on Southern plantations as a way to solidify their marriage traditions, because enslaved people's marriages were not legally recognized.

So you're talking about people who didn't have very many options, but they attached meaning and symbolism to what seems like a very simple thing to do.

And so my wife wanted to do that.

And by this point, I had decided that I wanted to go to graduate school to study the African diaspora and slavery in the Atlantic world.

I was semi-familiar with the ritual.

She had learned about it in a class that she was taking a few months before we got married.

Some friends of ours jumped over the broom themselves.

And we thought it would be kind of interesting and cool to kind of solidify our own union in that capacity.

But the way that my actual book formulates is directly tied to this, because when we were preparing kind of the wedding customs and processions, the Minister wanted to describe the ritual to the audience, because there's an assumption, realistic one, that a lot of people might not know what it is or why people do it.

So he asked me to get some research together, like a description of the ritual for him to just, you know, give to the audience.

And, you know, in my research brain, as I was going into graduate school, I thought, well, then he must want like a 35-page research paper.

And so I bring him all this documentation, because at this point I had access to a university library, and I thought that I was just going to uncover everything.

And I found a lot of really interesting material that connected the ritual back to Western Europe.

So all of these questions started formulating into my mind as to why enslaved people would adopt it and how it becomes popular amongst African Americans in the 20th century.

And so I deliver this material to him, and you know, he looks at me with this face that says, I'm not going to read all of this.

-Thought you were going to give me some bullet points.

-Exactly.

That's kind of what he said.

He's like, I'm thinking more like five to six sentences.

If you can do that, that'd be great.

-So the preparation for your wedding included, ended up including writing a book.

-And, you know, I guess I can toot my own horn on this.

It did win an award for kind of its innovation.

So I do feel like that direct connection that, you know, my wife and I shared formed what I think is one of the most significant contributions in understanding this ritual.

And so it all started with, you know, two people in love who kind of planned a wedding, and it became one of the things that defined my scholarly career.

-Before we run out of time, I want to talk about Juneteenth.

So 2021 is when President Joe Biden signed this into law recognizing it as a federal holiday.

I believe the Senate unanimously passed this.

-Mm-hmm.

-What is its significance?

It's only been a few years that we have been aware of this holiday or able to take a day off.

And so then, in that respect, how should we be utilizing and acknowledging and respecting this day?

-Yeah.

This is a great question.

I think succinctly, the best answer I can give is to remember the intentions behind why people begin celebrating it over, you know, 150-160 years ago.

This, this commemoration that was held in Galveston, Texas, initially, and then spread throughout the United States, was basically a statement that July 4 did not fulfill all of the promises of the American republic, these declarations of rights and freedom, until everyone was free.

And that didn't really happen until June 19, 1865.

This fulfillment of the Emancipation Proclamation, the order that all slaves are free, that chattel bondage is never going to commence again within the United States, that aspect of it, in viewing Juneteenth as a fulfillment of the promises of July 4, is, I think, the best way to remember it.

And so coming together as a community and recognizing the liberties that we do have, but also the continued pursuit for justice is an important component of it.

-Tyler D. Parry, thank you so much for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank you, Amber.

I appreciate it.