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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
Love In Action: Noting Similarities Between Lynching Then & Anti-Lgbt Violence Now, Koritha Mitchell
Love In Action: Noting Similarities Between Lynching Then & Anti-Lgbt Violence Now, Koritha Mitchell
Koritha Mitchell
The more I learn about the violence currently plaguing LGBT communities, the more it reminds me of the brutal practice of lynching, which has been the focus my research for the past 15 years. Ultimately, both forms of violence are designed to deny targeted groups recognition as citizens. Relying on my expertise regarding racial violence as well as the data on anti-LGBT attacks collected by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), this essay notes similarities between lynching at the last turn of the century and anti-LGBT violence today. The piece identifies five parallels: 1) the mundane quality of the …
Mamie Bradley's Unbearable Burden: Sexual And Aesthetic Politics In Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Koritha Mitchell
Mamie Bradley's Unbearable Burden: Sexual And Aesthetic Politics In Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Koritha Mitchell
Koritha Mitchell
This essay offers a reading of Bebe Moore Campbell's 1992 novel Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, which re-imagines the 1955 murder of Emmett Till and its aftermath. I argue that the novel is a tribute to Till and his mother, Mamie Bradley, but that it also illustrates the agony of being the survivor whose pain occasions such tributes. Through Delotha Todd, the character loosely based on Bradley, Campbell imagines the mother's burden to have been especially unbearable because so many strangers, including Campbell herself, claimed to share it. In the process of acknowledging the many facets Delotha's pain, Campbell …