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Full-Text Articles in History
A Day At The Races In Black And White: How An 1898 Horse Race Led To A Whipping, A Lawsuit, And A 1901 Arrest, John A. Drobnicki
A Day At The Races In Black And White: How An 1898 Horse Race Led To A Whipping, A Lawsuit, And A 1901 Arrest, John A. Drobnicki
Publications and Research
After losing an 1898 horse race in the Bronx, New York, African-American jockey Alonzo ‘Lonnie’ Clayton, who had won the Kentucky Derby in 1892 at the age of fifteen, heard an insult from the crowd along the rail and struck a white spectator from Brooklyn across the face with his riding whip. The blow resulted in a two hundred dollar fine by the track stewards, but ultimately led to a civil trial, a financial judgment against Clayton that he ignored, and then an arrest and incarceration for non-payment of the judgment, which some writers mistakenly still claim was for race-fixing. …
Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton
Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton
Publications and Research
This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …