2025 Mahan Lecture to Discuss Suburban Drug Crisis

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Posted on February 21, 2025

Lance Crawford

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Author Dr. Matthew D. Lassiter will speak at the University of South Alabama’s 2025 Howard F. Mahan Lecture on Tuesday, March 11, at 7 p.m. at the Laidlaw Performing Arts Center. The event is free and open to the public.

Lassiter’s speech will focus on his book, “The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs,” published in November 2023. It received the Urban History Association’s Kenneth Jackson Award for best book in the category of North American Urban History.

“Matthew Lassiter’s book demonstrated how the government, media, the police and others protected white suburbia from the 1960s through the 1980s by portraying Black and other minority Americans as drug dealers and criminals,” said Dr. David Messenger, professor and chair in USA’s Department of History. “This fueled the drug wars of these time periods and ignored the real spread of drug use among whites in our suburbs.” 

Lassiter is the Louis Evans Professor of History and Arthur F. Thurman Professor at the University of Michigan. His research and teaching focuses on political history, urban and suburban studies, racial and social inequality, and the history of policing.

USA’s Mahan Lecture is named after Dr. Howard F. Mahan, the founding chair of the Department of History in the College of Arts and Sciences. It is funded with the generous support of the University of South Alabama Foundation. The Department of History established the annual lecture in honor of Mahan’s enduring contributions to his students, colleagues, community and state.

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