Since I first learned of the sad news that Dr. Bailey passed away, I planned to come and pay my respects in person to this truly unique, creative, intellectual giant who profoundly influenced the way I think about history (and I daresay, so many others who knew him) but I had to change my plans at the last minute and unfortunately, will not be able to attend. At the risk of being somewhat intellectually lazy, which would undoubtedly disappoint Dr. Bailey since he was always on his academic game, I will repeat a few things I wrote over the last month about him and will synthesize some of these together in this remembrance. I feel it is warranted in that when I wrote these words, my surprise and grief were raw and I feel they continue to represent how I feel about this man that I truly did love and consider a teacher, mentor, inspiration, father figure, and a lovely human being.

My original posting on Facebook:

The world darkened a bit yesterday as we lost a wonderful, inspiring, creative light, Dr. David Bailey of Michigan State University. His History of the South class that I took when I was a lowly sophomore in 1991 literally changed my life being a sheltered, ignorant white girl from a rural Sundown town in mid-Michigan. He opened my eyes with his lectures and the readings he assigned and is one of the reasons I chose to go into African American history. I was fortunate to take graduate level classes with him along the way and serve as his TA in an online Sports History class. I think I’ve made it abundantly clear I don’t care a bit about sports but Dave Bailey even made sports fascinating in the context of race and social history in America. He was a beautiful, kind person and will be sorely missed.”

I used to periodically check to see if he was on FB and I never found him. He was so terrible with emails (love you, Dr. Bailey!) so I seldom wrote him after moving out of MI. But I used to randomly wander into his office just to chat with him while I was up there and no matter how many papers were stacked and overflowing on his desk, he was always welcoming.

I have given various acknowledgments to Dr. Bailey over the years, and I feel it is worthwhile to share a few of them in this space to demonstrate how deeply entrenched David Bailey’s spirit is within my work, including in my thesis, which he greatly helped shape by serving on my committee and offering his substantial thoughts and criticisms. As I wrote, “Dr. Bailey has always been a supportive and creative mentor. He has consistently pushed his students to examine all potential sources to get at the truth. He was always a proponent of utilizing the material sphere to accomplish this, with the use of archaeology as a tool to flesh out the history about which the documents are silent or misleading.” He constantly encouraged me to continue my efforts in historic archaeology and was interested in hearing about the projects I was involved in and soothed my guilty feelings of having one foot in the dirt and one in the library.

His presence in my life as a scholar continued during the time I returned to MSU as a doctoral student. As I wrote in the acknowledgement to my dissertation, “Specifically, within the Department, there have been numerous faculty members who have imprinted my project and scholarship with their own teaching and writing and served as inspirations in countless ways. Dr. David Bailey and Dr. Richard Thomas have inspired me for decades now with their commitment to arousing interest and passion for history in students. Both are amazingly creative and have shared their zeal for thinking outside the box with students and everyone else they come into contact with. And this has inspired me since I was an undergraduate and master’s student here.”

What a sad event to lose him but he made such an impact on the lives he touched. He was such a generous person with his time and ideas and even food. One of the stand outs about Dr. Bailey was his interest in foodways and the transmission of culture and the interplay of geography within this. He would make seminar classes so much more enjoyable by bringing in bagels and cream cheese. In fact, it was really strange timing but I was just talking about him on the very Friday before he passed because in the US History classes that I teach, we were playing Reacting to the Past and we’ve had three socials for each of the three events and my students have all amazed me by bringing in food and drinks. They made me feel so guilty that I performed “an unnatural act” by baking cookies (I HATE to cook)!! I was just telling one of them about how one of my dearest professors Dr. Bailey would bring food to class (especially bagels!) and how he pointed out rightly(!) that it made discussions so much more enjoyable.

MSU will not be the same without his quirky and creative questions during job talks and in classes. I used to actually look forward to the job talks in the History Department to witness how Dr. Bailey was going to pull it all together and ask the kind of question that inspired awe in the way in which the inner mechanisms of his mind worked. He was truly a one-of-a-kind.

The last class I took with Dr. Bailey was the HIST 9000 class. There were many gems that Dr. Bailey shared with us. One of the more interesting ones I found was to have us mine our favorite books to come up with the best opening lines. In honor of Dr. Bailey, here’s one of my favorites: “This book is a story, but at the same time it is not” (Winthrop Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek). In fact, it was in Dr. Bailey’s class that I gained a truly deep appreciation of this scholar, who is one of my favorite historians, Winthrop Jordan, because of the way that Dr. Bailey spoke of him to us as a historian who carried his personal principles into his own work. It is evident that Dr. Bailey practiced this philosophy himself.

I continue alternating between tears and chuckles thinking about him. The one thing I’ll never forget is how he was such a hoarder with his books! Towering scads of them. He had a huge collection of records too…blues and jazz, among other genres, I think. True, hard-core historian. Honestly, with all his talk of his Irish grandmother’s stories about “the little people,” (I think that was how he said it), I think he would want to be remembered in all the myriad of ways he left his profound, humorous, brilliant mark on the world. He will never be forgotten and his legacy will live through his students, his colleagues, friends, and everyone whose life he touched, the most important of whom are his family and of course, his wonderful daughters.

Always in love, gratitude, and remembrance,