I had the pleasure of taking one of Dr. Bailey’s classes during my time as an undergraduate student at Michigan State University. The class was titled “American Intellectual History to 1860”, and I was intimidated at first due to him assigning readings that I have never heard of. Bailey assigned the class readings from historical figures such as Theodore Dwight Weld, who was one of the architects of the the abolitionists movement, speeches from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the various drafts of the Gettysburg Address, and Rousseay’s “Social Contract”. Each of the readings he assigned the class, we never finished discussing because we would spend the entire class period discussing the first sentence or paragraph of an historical document. I have never been that intellectually stimulated over a sentence or paragraph, but that was Bailey’s style of teaching, and it worked.

I remember him coming to class and having no notes or PowerPoint slides. This was very different from any professor I had encountered at Michigan State. He magically facilitated discussion and pushed me to always think deeper. One particular point in the class, we had a discussion on Abraham Lincoln, and this is where I developed a fond interest in the “Great Emancipator”. Bailey challenged me think about Lincoln’s upbringing, what he said in his speeches and writings, and how that correlated to his actions. This pushing led me to conduct my Ronald E. McNair Scholars program research on Abraham Lincoln and The Reconstruction Era. At the time I didn’t realize how Bailey’s pushing led me to delve into serious scholarly research on one of the most enigmatic President’s in U.S. History.

I am now a teacher of History and English at the high school level, and the teachings that Bailey gave me, I now give to my students and it is in that way his spirit and legacy will carry on for generations. My pedagogy as a teacher and my views as a human being have been forever changed due to Dr. Bailey, and I’m forever grateful for his contributions to myself and Michigan State University. Rest peacefully, Dr. Bailey.