{"id":5020,"date":"2026-07-04T14:48:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T18:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/?p=5020"},"modified":"2026-07-05T08:05:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T12:05:28","slug":"honoring-jeffrey-b-leak-and-his-legacy-as-a-scholar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/blog\/2026\/07\/04\/honoring-jeffrey-b-leak-and-his-legacy-as-a-scholar\/","title":{"rendered":"Honoring Jeffrey B. Leak and His Legacy as a Scholar"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dr. Jeffrey B. Leak died on June 29, 2026. Jeffrey was my friend and a long-time colleague at UNC Charlotte. I first met Jeffrey in 1998 when he joined the English Department. At the time, we were the only members of the department with PhDs in American Studies, and this commonality drew us together. We often talked about our shared interest in the complex connections between American literature and American history, and we sometimes discussed our current research projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the course of his career at UNC Charlotte, Jeffrey held numerous leadership positions, including President of the Faculty, Director of the Center for the Study of the New South, Director of the American Studies Program, and Interim Associate Dean of the Honors College, but throughout his illustrious career he remained an active scholar.  In the coming days, I am sure others will write about Jeffrey as a family man, as a Deacon with the Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, as a dedicated teacher, and as a university and community leader. However, since I have read much of Jeffrey\u2019s published scholarship, I will focus this blog post on Jeffrey\u2019s legacy as a scholar.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Jeffrey was interested in understanding how social forces, such as racism, shaped the lives of individual people. Jeffrey\u2019s intellectual curiosity was often sparked when a person responded in a unique or unpredictable way to such social forces. Jeffrey\u2019s interest in the Black conservative writer George S. Schuyler relates to this side of Jeffrey\u2019s scholarship. Jeffrey wanted to know how and why a Black socialist writer from 1920s eventually became a well-known conservative writer during the 1960s and early \u201870s. Jeffrey did extensive research on why Schuyler eventually turned against many of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Jeffrey\u2019s curiosity about Schuyler\u2019s changing views is reflected in his first book, an edited volume titled Rac(e)ing to the Right: Selected Essays of George S. Schuyler. <\/em>Published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2001, this collection established Jeffrey as an up-and-coming scholar in the field of Black Studies.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Jeffrey\u2019s second book, a monograph titled Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature, <\/em>was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2005. In this book, he explored the portrayal of Black masculinity in several key literary works, including Frederick Douglass\u2019s Narrative, <\/em>Richard Wright\u2019s Native Son, <\/em>Ralph Ellison\u2019s Invisible Man, <\/em>and Toni Morrison\u2019s Song of Solomon. <\/em>Jeffrey drew on Black feminist criticism and gender studies in this book, and in the process, he challenged prevailing stereotypes regarding Black males in American culture. As Priscilla Ramsey said in her review of the book in The Journal of African American History, <\/em>\u201cLeak presents a complex and sophisticated analysis of racial and sexual mythmaking in the works of major African American literary figures in the 20th<\/sup> century.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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Jeffrey\u2019s third book, a literary biography titled Visible Man: The Life of Henry Dumas,<\/em> was released by the University of Georgia Press in 2014.  Jeffrey\u2019s biography of Henry Dumas, a promising African American writer and poet who died in 1968 at the age of 33, is as much a study of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s as it is an account of Dumas\u2019s short life.  In writing this biography, Dr. Leak drew heavily on his expertise in the areas of African American literature and culture and the history of the Civil Rights Movement.  He also, however, drew on personal interviews, archival research, and his own insights into Dumas\u2019s poetry and other writings. Jeffrey\u2019s biography of Dumas received the top award for a nonfiction book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.<\/p>\n\n\n

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I had the privilege of working with Jeffrey on one of his final scholarly projects. He wrote the chapter on Jimmy Carter’s An Hour Before Daylight, <\/em>Carter\u2019s autobiographical account of his childhood, for The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter<\/em> (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), which I co-edited with Frye Gaillard. Jeffrey and I shared a long-standing interest in Carter, so I invited him to write the chapter on Carter\u2019s autobiography. Jeffrey was already experiencing health problems when I reached out to him, but he readily agreed to take on the project. When it was time to do the final edits on his chapter, he was in a hospital undergoing treatment. I informed him that I would take care of the final edits myself, but he insisted on finishing the chapter on his own even though this meant that he was writing from his hospital bed. His dedication to his scholarship impressed me then, and it still impresses me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jeffrey will be missed by many in Storied Charlotte and far beyond, but his scholarship will live on for years to come. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dr. Jeffrey B. Leak died on June 29, 2026. Jeffrey was my friend and a long-time colleague at UNC Charlotte. I first met Jeffrey in 1998 when he joined the English Department. At the time, we were the only members of the department with PhDs in American Studies, and this commonality drew us together. We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[404],"class_list":["post-5020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storied-charlotte","tag-jeffrey-leak"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5020"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5029,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5020\/revisions\/5029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}