African American Studies Commons^™

'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.

Voting Blocks, Julian Maxwell Hayter

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

In 1971, Creighton Court resident Curtis Holt filed a monumental lawsuit against the city. His suit attacked an increasingly problematic, yet subtle form of institutionalized racism — the dilution of African-Americans’ growing voting power. Richmond had annexed 23 square miles of Chesterfield County a year earlier to head off the city’s growing black electorate and keep City Council predominantly white. Holt’s suit charged that blacks would have won a council majority in 1970 had Richmond not added 47,000 suburbanites, only 3 percent of whom were black.

''Get Your Asphalt Off My Ancestors!'': Reclaiming Richmond's African Burial Ground, Mai-Linh Hong

Faculty Journal Articles

By treating spatial conflict as one way communities wrestle with the memory and legacy of slavery, this article unites critical landscape analysis, a tool of legal geography, with legal and cultural analysis and recent scholarship on African American reparations. A slave cemetery lay beneath a parking lot in Shockoe Bottom, a neighborhood of downtown Richmond that was once a major slave-trading hub. In recent years, controversy arose over the site’s use, generating racially charged local debate and two failed lawsuits seeking to preserve the site. This article examines the significance of the African Burial Ground controversy by analyzing its symbolic, …

Freedom Indivisible: Gays And Lesbians In The African American Civil Rights Movement, Jared E. Leighton

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This work documents the role of sixty gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals in the African American civil rights movement in the pre-Stonewall era. It examines the extent of their involvement from the grassroots to the highest echelons of leadership. Because many lesbians and gays were not out during their time in the movement, and in some cases had not yet identified as lesbian or gay, this work also analyzes how the civil rights movement, and in a number of cases women’s liberation, contributed to their identity formation and coming out. This work also contributes to our understanding of opposition to …

Interview Of Mary Butler, Mary Butler, Zach Bower

All Oral Histories

Mary (King) Butler was born in 1942 in King and Queen County, Virginia. Her parents are Hayes and Blanche King. Her father’s parents were Archie King, Sr. and Rossie King. Her mother’s parents were Joshua and Peggie Whiting. Mary is the oldest of four children. Her two brothers were born in 1943 and 1951, and her sister was born in 1961. Her nuclear family lived close to her father’s parent’s farm in Plainview, VA. Her family was active in both Union Prospect Baptist Church and First Baptist Church.

Butler worked often on her grandparent’s farm as a child. Butler and …

A Theodicy Of Redemptive Suffering In African American Involvement Led By Absalom Jones And Richard Allen In The Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic Of 1793, Kyle Boone

Undergraduate Student Scholarship – History

This paper is a historical investigation into the involvement of African Americans during the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793. It explores key figures, details, medical realities, and media representation. The particular focus lies on the dilemma of suffering in the world and how the African American understanding of evil in this community led to their decision of involvement. Their understanding of theodicy will be weighed against modern philosophical and theological attempts to deal with theodicy.

Ua12/2/33 Whips & Chains, Wku Association For The Study Of African American Life & History

WKU Archives Records

Invitation to first WKU Association for the Study of African American Life & History event entitled Whips & Chains.

Slaves To Contradictions: 13 Myths That Sustained Slavery, Wilson Huhn

Akron Law Faculty Publications

People have a fundamental need to think of themselves as “good people.” To achieve this we tell each other stories – we create myths – about ourselves and our society. These myths may be true or they may be false. The more discordant a myth is with reality, the more difficult it is to convince people to embrace it. In such cases to sustain the illusion of truth it may be necessary to develop an entire mythology – an integrated web of mutually supporting stories. This paper explores the system of myths that sustained the institution of slavery in the …

Ua3/1/2/2 President's Office-Cherry Correspondence - Special, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Special correspondence regarding Western Kentucky University. This series runs concurrently with the General Correspondence and there is no indication of what makes it special. Of special note is correspondence regarding the Student Army Training Corps, World War I veterans and construction of Cherry Hall. Incoming letters are mainly addressed to Henry Hardin Cherry. Responses are made by Cherry and occasionally by faculty and staff. The president's secretary Mattie McLean is the author of some of the letters signed by Cherry.

New Negroes On Campus: St. Clair Drake And The Culture Of Education, Reform, And Rebellion At Hampton Institute, Andrew Rosa

History Faculty Publications

On March 15, 1925, Walter Scott Copeland, owner and editor of the Newport News Daily Press, charged that Hampton Institute was teaching and practicing “social equality between the white and negro races . . . The niggers in that institution,” he wrote, “were being taught that there ought not to be any distinction between themselves and white people.” His observation came from his wife, who was distraught after having seen a performance of the Denishawn Dancers while seated next to a black women in Hampton’s Ogden Hall only two weeks before.⁴ Based in Los Angeles and New York, the …