MBA student to have first master’s degree thesis published

Thursday, April 28, 2016

While enrolled in a course titled “Race, Injustice, and Memory in the 20th Century,” Rebekah Spaulding was presented with a project. At the time she was taking this course, Spaulding listened to singer Bob Dylan's “Hurricane” on a mixed tape her brother left in his car. This song inspired her thesis, a content analysis of “Hurricane” by Bob Dylan.

“The main subject of that song is Hurricane Rubin Carter, who was a boxer,” Spaulding said. “In the 1960s he was arrested for a triple-homicide. Everyone who knows this story knows there was a lot of coverage on it, but there was another guy who was arrested with him at the exact same time.”

The triple-homicide Spaulding refers to in her thesis occurred in 1966 after Carter and his friend John Artis were stopped by police officers in Paterson, New Jersey. The two men were brought to the scene of a crime at the Lafayette Bar and Grill. The police searched Carter’s car and found ammunition that fit that of the murder weapon.

Carter and Artis were arrested, tried and convicted for the crime in 1967, and again in 1976. Spaulding explained that Artis received no coverage by the media and was not mentioned in the song or much in the movie, The Hurricane, while Carter was heavily publicized for the crime.

“He [Carter] was kind of lost in history because of how Rubin Carter’s fame took over the story,” Spaulding said. “Now we look back on it and use the movie and song as a reference point and none of this includes John Artis.”

Spaulding saw the unequal coverage as a prime example of injustice and believes that people’s recollection of the story is the cause of the injustice.

In her thesis, Spaulding used Carter’s autobiography The Sixteenth Round, two monographs, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice by William Stuntz and The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and numerous newspaper articles as the foundation for her arguments.

Spaulding also saw this story as a case of black criminality, another reason she chose this story for her thesis.

“Perhaps no other group of people in history has been systematically persecuted and condemned by outside perceptions as harshly as African-Americans,” Spaulding said. “This is what Carter and Artis experienced, an assumed black criminality.”

Spaulding explained that although Carter had a criminal history prior to this crime, Artis had no criminal record. She also mentioned that the two men were arrested and convicted by an all-white jury with little investigation.

“I often describe my paper as the influence of media bias on our memory; we let pop culture, newspapers, and other media tell us the story they want to tell, but there's always more to the story,” Spaulding said. “I also describe my paper in that way because I know how relevant it is in today's society; we are inundated with the 24-hour news cycle shouting at us about what we should believe. It's important that we view history through as many lenses as possible, not just the rose-colored ones.”

Because the case took place in Paterson, N.J., Spaulding submitted her thesis to the New Jersey’s Study Journal. After two years, Spaulding was notified her work would be published.

“I was just elated,” Spaulding said. “I was so excited. The journal had changed hands from being run by Rutgers University and now by Monmouth University, so that stalled out my process.”

Spaulding’s thesis started as a 45-page document, but after the revisions process the paper now stands at about 25 to 30 pages.

“It has gone through a couple of different revisions that has changed the landscape of the paper,” Spaulding said.

While revising her paper, Spaulding has been enrolled as a full-time MBA student at OSU’s Watson Graduate School of Management.

Although the process of revising her thesis and managing her course work was challenging, it was worth the effort when she found out her thesis was going to be published, she said.

Spaulding will graduate from the OSU MBA program this summer and plans to use her degrees in history and her MBA to start a career in research and writing or in management for a non-profit organization.

Spaulding notified Janice Analla, assistant director of business graduate programs for the Watson Graduate School of Management, soon after receiving the news.

“I was really excited for Rebekah when she told me about being published,” Analla said. “This is another example of the diverse background of our MBA students and the positive impact they have on society.”