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Just What They Have Been Looking For: The Significance, Importance, And Journey Of The Negro Motorist Green Book In The State Of South Carolina And The City Of Columbia In The Twentieth Century, Justice Iyana Briscoe

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Travel and tourism in the United States had become an essential pastime for all social classes by the end of the nineteenth century going into the twentieth century. Due to segregation, however, only whites were able to thoroughly enjoy this glorious luxury openly. African Americans during this time had to find ways to enjoy this pastime while avoiding the constant discrimination, humiliation, and embarrassment that came with traveling. From this need were created black travel guides such as the highly successful Negro Motorist Green Book produced by African American businessman and entrepreneur Victor Hugo Green. From 1936 to 1966, Green’s …

Antislavery White Supremacists And The Mistreatment Of African Americans In Indiana, 1787-1870, Mark A. King

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Conventional wisdom holds that Indiana was always predominantly antislavery because it had begun as a territory of the United States under the Northwest Territory Act of 1787, which prohibited slavery; however, this is incorrect. This northern state had about as much proslavery sentiment as most states in the South. The state wrestled with the issue in the legislative session after the legislative session and court case after court case for decades during the antebellum period. Prominent settlers and state organizers petitioned Congress to allow the Indiana Territory to become a slave region. After statehood, proslavery forces continued to push for …

A Call To Revolution, Howard Robinson

LWLC Faculty Research

On October 12, 1974, three African American Muslim men took over WAPX, a Rhythm and Blues radio station located on Dexter Avenue in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. During the siege the men announced on air that the “revolution has begun,” and then encouraged the African American population to join them in an armed confrontation with local police. An ensuing shootout brought 300 law enforcement officers to Dexter Avenue, where they rained thousands of bullets into the radio station. The standoff lasted almost three hours before the hostages escaped, teargas was employed, and a negotiator convinced the three men to surrender. While …

Arlington’S Freedmen’S Village: Becoming Untethered, Gavin Gerard Harrell

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This investigative study will discuss how the Freedmen's Village was designed as a community for the formerly enslaved to demonstrate what they could achieve with freedom. However, residents arriving at the Village found that they still had many restrictions placed on them and their labor, like de-facto slavery. The Freedmen’s Bureau was in charge of the Freedmen's Village. The Freedmen’s Village refused to allow able-bodied individuals to go without work, demonstrating the importance of employment. Furthermore, private agencies collaborated with both Freedmen's Village and the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide job opportunities outside of the Village for some residents. Many of …

Stonewalls And Statues: A Personal Exploration Of Memorialization Culture Within The United States, Petra Mcdonnell-Ingoglia

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

A personal exploration of Confederate memorials and the Lost Cause narrative. How and who has created these memorials is integral in understanding the rise of racial hatred and racial violence in the U.S., and is rooted in the creation of Confederate culture and memorialization. This paper explores those topics while also trying to reckon with where we go from here and how we unravel the mythical narrative that has had such an impact on our society.

African American History Since Emancipation, Laurie Woodard

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus is designed for a lecture course on Post-Emancipation African American history.

Reframing Leadership Narratives Through The African American Lens, Marion Missy Mcgee

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Reframing Leadership Narratives through the African American Lens explores the context-rich experiences of Black Museum executives to challenge dominant cultural perspectives of what constitutes a leader. Using critical narrative discourse analysis, this research foregrounds under-told narratives and reveals the leadership practices used to proliferate Black Museums to contrast the lack of racially diverse perspectives in the pedagogy of leadership studies. This was accomplished by investigating the origin stories of African American executives using organizational leadership and social movement theories as analytical lenses for making sense of leaders’ tactics and strategies. Commentary from Black Museum leaders were interspersed with sentiments of …

Aa Ms 19 Eugene Jackson Papers, Emily Margaret Newell

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

This collection is comprised of family photographs, photo albums, bibles, hymnals, and newspaper from the early 20th century onward. The collection is organized into three series:

Series 1: Photographs

This series includes the personal photographs of Eugene Jackson’s friends and family as far back as the early 1900s. The most common themes and activities found in these photographs are leisure activities such as trips to the beach or the mountains, family get-togethers, professional portraits, and Christmas greeting cards.

Subseries 1.1: Loose Photographs

Loose photographs are organized into topical folders.

Subseries 1.2: Ruby Family Photograph Album

The photograph album includes black-and-white …

Through The Ivory Curtain: African Americans In Cleveland Heights, Ohio, Before The Fair Housing Movement, J. Mark Souther

History Faculty Publications

This article examines the largely neglected history of African American struggles to obtain housing in Cleveland Heights, a first-ring suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, between 1900 and 1960, prior to the fair housing and managed integration campaigns that emerged thereafter. The article explores the experiences of black live-in servants, resident apartment building janitors, independent renters, and homeowners. It offers a rare look at the ways that domestic and custodial arrangements opened opportunities in housing and education, as well as the methods, calculations, risks, and rewards of working through white intermediaries to secure homeownership. It argues that the continued black presence laid …

Bearing Report: A Roundtable On Historians And American Veterans, James Marten

History Faculty Research and Publications

Five historians—each an expert on a specific era and issue related to veterans—were asked to ponder the following questions: 1. What are the most important questions explored by historians in veterans studies? 2. What are the books that have been most useful to your particular area of interest in veterans studies? 3. How can the history of veterans help us understand larger cultural, social, and economic issues during the time periods in which the veterans you study lived? 4. What are the particular contributions that a historic sensibility can bring to the study of veterans of any war? 5. How …

From The Volga To The Mississippi: African Americans And The Soviet Experiment, Daniel Candee

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This thesis investigates the role of African American Communists in the struggle for Black liberation during the interwar period. Making a vital intervention into the field, this work attempts to debunk the harmful Cold-War stereotype of African American Communists as “puppets of Moscow” while simultaneously engaging critically with the relationship between Black liberation and international Communism. Drawing on a vast array of secondary and archival sources, this work charts a course between a vision of the Comintern as an avenging anti-colonial angel, and a cynical force disinterested in Black Liberation.

Tracing the developing relationship between Black intellectuals and the Comintern …

Between Harlem And Paris: Haitian Internationalism In The Interwar Period, 1919-1937, Felix Jean-Louis Iii

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project locates the transnational contributions of elite Haitians to the efforts to remake blackness and mitigate the racial subjugation of people of African descent between 1919 and 1937. The arguments forwarded here are founded on archival materials such as letters, newspapers, personal documents, and the reports of government agents. Through my engagements with these documents, at times reading against the grain, I explore the ways in which my actors directed the course of events and shaped the discourses of major organizations that sought to affect Pan-African solidarity and promote anti-colonialism. It locates their participation two major sites interwar black …

Black And White Notes: Segregation, Integration, And Urban Renewal Through Pittsburgh's Locals 60 And 471, Nathan Seeley

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores Pittsburgh’s Locals 60, 471, and 60-471 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) from the late nineteenth century to the mid-1960s. Local 60 was founded in 1896 for white musicians and Local 471 in 1908 for black musicians. While other studies of the AFM take a “top-down” approach, this study examines these Locals from the “bottom-up.” In doing so, it re-examines the causal relationship between music/musicians and the social, political, and economic conditions intersecting with them. This dissertation is built upon seventy-two interviews conducted between former Local 471 members in the 1990s, photographs from Teenie Harris Collection …

Christopherson, Kathryn Kendall (Donley) "Katy," 1921-2017 (Mss 672), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 672. Correspondence, articles, interviews, photographs, and printed matter relating to the work of Katy Christopherson, Louisville, Kentucky, as a maker, curator, judge, lecturer and writer on quilts and quilting. Includes material relating to her involvement with the Kentucky Heritage Quilt Society and the Louisville Nimble Thimbles, Inc.

Black Cloud: The Struggles Of St. Cloud's African American Community, 1880-1920, Christopher P. Lehman

Ethnic and Women's Studies Faculty Publications

From the 1890s to the 1920s, a community of over one dozen African Americans existed in St. Cloud, Minnesota. It consisted of African Americans from the South and elsewhere in the North. Most found employment in low-wage jobs, but some--like John Webster and David Basfield--started their own businesses in town. Their children attended the same schools as the other local school-age children, and one of them--Ruby Cora Webster--became the first known graduate of what became St. Cloud State University. The children left St. Cloud by the 1920s, and their parents either stayed there or relocated with them. In the meantime, …

Atwood, Rufus Ballard, 1897-1963 (Sc 3397), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3397. Curriculum vitae of Rufus B. Atwood, who became president of Kentucky State University, Frankfort, Kentucky in 1929. The document lists his educational credentials, achievements as KSU president, organizational affiliations, and published and unpublished work.

The Wiley Funeral Home Records At Ouachita Baptist University, Lisa K. Speer

Articles

In 2009, Ouachita Baptist University's Special Collections and Archives received a set of records from the Wiley Funeral Home (now Mitchell Funeral Home) of Arkadelphia, containing death certificates, burial transit permits, and funeral insurance records kept between 1941-1968. The records document the lives of several thousand African Americans who were either residents of Clark County or whose funerals were handled by Wiley Funeral Home.

Shake Rag Clippings File, Kentucky Library Research Collections

Research Collections

The Shake Rag Historic District, located along the north end of State Street in Bowling Green, Kentucky, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in September 2000. It is Bowling Green’s first National Register District recognized for its significance to African American history. The Shake Rag Neighborhood developed around Lee Square, a parcel of land donated in 1802 for use as a public square. From https://www.visitbgky.com/shakerag/, see for more information.

Rose’S Gift: Slavery, Kinship, And The Fabric Of Memory, Mark J. Auslander

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

One of the most evocative objects in the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture is an embroidered cloth bag that has come to be known as “Ashley’s Sack”. Stitch-work on the bag, signed “Ruth Middleton”, recounts the bag’s painful history, as a gift presented by an enslaved woman, Rose, to her daughter Ashley, when Ashley was sold at age nine in South Carolina. This paper explores ‘Ashley’s sack’ as an object of history, memory, ritual action, and aesthetic creativity.

Family History Of Sheryl Patterson-Coulibaly, Sheryl Patterson-Coulibaly

Your Family in History: HIST 550/700

Many African Americans desire to research their family's lineage. Many find that research difficult and as such, must rely on family stories passed down from generation to generation. This research began from family stories some of which was confirmed by research. This paper chronicles the Belford/Jackson family for six generations living in Northern Florida. This research was completed over the course of two semesters.

The Family History Of Sheryl M. Patterson-Coulibaly, Sheryl Patterson-Coulibaly

Your Family in History: HIST 550/700

Many African Americans desire to research their family's lineage. Many find that research difficult and as such, must rely on family stories passed down from generation to generation. This research began from family stories some of which was confirmed by research. This paper chronicles the Belford/Jackson family for six generations living in Northern Florida.

Assessing Reconstruction: Did The South Undergo Revolutionary Change?, Lauren H. Sobotka

Student Publications

With the end of the Civil War, came a number of unanswered questions Reconstruction would attempt to answer for the South. While the South underwent economic, political and social changes for a short period, old traditions continued to persist resulting in racist sentiment.

"Town Of God": Ota Benga, The Batetela Boys, And The Promise Of Black America, Karen Sotiropoulos

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Link Racial Past To The Present, Jill Ogline Titus

Civil War Institute Faculty Publications

Americans have been putting a great deal of energy into commemorating the 50th anniversary of some of the key moments of the civil rights movement. This burst of memorialization has inspired one new museum in Atlanta and the redesign of another in Memphis. The Smithsonian and Library of Congress are launching a new oral-history initiative, and films like Selma bring the movement to life for those who rarely read a history book or visit a museum.

This year brings more anniversaries: the Selma-to-Montgomery March, the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and the Watts rebellion. And the commemorative stakes are …

African Americans Speak To Spectacle Lynchings, Mary Beth Mathews

Classics, Philosophy, and Religion Articles

Donald Mathews’s “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice” both describes southern lynching as a lived interpretation of Christianity and claims a role for the religious study of lynching. Relying largely on historiography, Mathews contends that white southerners created this religion and ignored obvious parallels between lynched black men and the death of Jesus on the cross. But missing from this and other interpretations is a key voice: that of contemporary black evangelical pastors.

Where's Jonesville? How The Destruction Of Jonesville Left A Legacy Of Housing Discrimination In Bowling Green, Ky, George Carpenter

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Jonesville was a small tight-knit African-American community in Bowling Green, Kentucky with a unique cultural identity. Family-oriented and extremely self-sufficient, Jonesville thrived as a prime example of southern black culture in the mid 20^th century. However, Jonesville did not stand a chance placed against a powerful local institution. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the community was destroyed to create space for an expanding Western Kentucky University. Fueled by the entirely unjust urban renewal legislation, Kentucky Project R-31, Jonesville was wiped from the Bowling Green map. Due to locally sanctioned discriminatory action, the displaced citizens of Jonesville were …

I Am Who I Am: The Book Of Exodus And African American Individuality, Joseph L. Kirkenir

Student Publications

Scholars often attempt to construct collective ideologies in order to generalize the beliefs and views of entire populations, with one target population frequently being the African American community during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, doing so fails to recognize the individuality of the population’s members and, especially in the case of the country’s oppressed Blacks, establishes a system where assumed notions and ignorant ideas abound. One might argue that the popularity of the book of Exodus in the time’s African American expressive outlets indicates that there did exist a collective ideology based upon the biblical narrative. However, …

I'Ve Seen The Promised Land: A Letter To Amelia Boynton Robinson, Mauricio E. Novoa

SURGE

You asked if I had any thoughts or comments at the end of our visit, and I stood and said nothing. I opened my mouth, but instead of giving you words my throat was sealed by a dam of speechlessness while my eyes wept out all the emotions and heartache that I wanted to share with you. The others in my group were able to express their admiration, so I wanted to do the same. [excerpt]

'Dred Scott V. Sandford' Analysis, Sarah E. Roessler

Student Publications

The Scott v. Sandford decision will forever be known as a dark moment in America's history. The Supreme Court chose to rule on a controversial issue, and they made the wrong decision. Scott v. Sandford is an example of what can happen when the Court chooses to side with personal opinion instead of what is right.

Book Review: Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln And The Movement For Black Resettlement, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

“There is a clause in the Act which is likely to meet with misconstruction in Europe,” wrote Frederick Milnes Edge about the legislation that emancipated the slaves of the District of Columbia in April 1862, “namely the appropriation for colonizing the freed slaves.” Ignore it, Edge advised. It only “was adopted to silence the weak-nerved, whose name is legion—and to enable any of the slaves who see fit to emigrate to more genial climes.” And this, for a long time, has been the way that most commentators have understood colonization—a plan ostensibly designed to expatriate any emancipated blacks to …