A native New Yorker born to Haitian immigrants, Joseph grew up an avid reader, consuming everything from newspapers to comic books to African-American and world history books. His mother’s nightly dinner conversations about history, labor politics and anti-racist struggles in Haiti nurtured his fascination with social justice. She also passed on a lifelong passion for activism, which has led him to join organizations and stand in picket lines for a number of causes. Among other issues, he’s fought to dismantle apartheid in South Africa and protested the quarantine of Haitian refugees in Guantanamo.

As an undergraduate at Stony Brook, Joseph wrote for the campus newspaper, thinking he would become a freelance journalist. But after realizing the financial difficulties inherent in the career field, he opted for graduate school, which would allow him to delve deeper into African-American history. After watching the documentary “Eyes on the Prize,� he says he wondered about the broader backstory surrounding the civil rights movement.

“I was looking forward to reading a book about the larger cause and the ideals of the time period, only to learn that no one had written it, so that fueled me to write it myself,� he says, referring to Midnight Hour.

Even before publishing Midnight Hour, Joseph had written extensively on civil rights and the Black Power movement in editorials and book  reviews for journals as well as The New York Times. He recently joined the editorial working group of the social science quarterly, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society. Currently, he is working on several new books, including a biography of activist Stokely Carmichael.

— By Lydia Lum