Professor Mills currently teaches courses in African American history at Vassar College—specifically on Martin Luther King, Jr., race and segregation, the civil rights and black power movement, and consumer culture. He is originally from the South Side of Chicago, and majored in business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (B.S. 1997). He holds a Masters degree in social sciences as well as a Doctorate from the University of Chicago.

His research focuses on African American social movements and financial security, particularly how African Americans’ wages, wealth, and overall financial well-being helped shape black public spaces, political engagement, and activism. His book, Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (2013), chronicles the history of black barber shops as businesses and civic institutions, demonstrating their central role in civil rights struggles throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has co-edited Black Subjects in Africa and Its Diasporas: Race and Gender in Research and Writing (2011) with Benjamin Talton, and co-authored Truth and Soul: Black Talk in the Barbershop with Melissa Harris-Lacewell. He is currently working on a second monograph, tentatively titled The Wages of Resistance: Financing the Black Freedom Movement, which examines how civil rights and black power organizations negotiated fundraising imperatives with their political ideologies as functions of movement building.

He is an avid runner and certified running coach (Road Runners Club of America), and helps others incorporate running into their daily lives, and recently started taking trumpet lessons—a humbling experience. Ultimately, teaching and learning sit at the core of his everyday life.