African American Studies Commons^™

The Story Of Jennie Steers: An Examination Of Race, Gender, And Lynching In Northwest Louisiana, Lauren Smith

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

As the nineteenth century ended, the American South entered a new century equipped with the foundations of a Jim Crow society. Through political intimidation, segregation, and racial violence—most notoriously through the practice of lynching—white Southerners reasserted white supremacist rule. Yet the lynching of Black men in this era is more often documented than the plight of Black women at the hands of white mobs and local authorities. By focusing on Jennie Steers, a woman lynched outside of Shreveport, Louisiana in 1903, this project sheds light on the violent history of Northwest Louisiana and the ways in which Black women navigated …

“They Can Only Be Influenced By Their Fears”: Redefining White Mob Violence Against Blacks, 1898 – 1917, Riots Or Pogroms?, Deroy C. Gordon

Doctoral Dissertations

The aim of this dissertation is to help to redefine racial riots carried out against the African American community in the United States during the 19^th and the early 20^th century. I provide an examination to argue for those racial riots to be redefined as pogroms rather than riots. Racial riots that had been carried out against the African American community in the United States often did not get the attention they deserve. The initial framing of those attacks as riots, made it difficult for black victims of those racial riots to seek legal redress or request government …

The Media Reproduction Of Racial Violence: A Content Analysis Of News Coverage Following The Death Of George Floyd Jr., Keylon Lovett

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The media has played a critical role in reproducing anti-Black violence in the United States, which has often harmed African American communities. Historically, the white press has depicted graphic imagery and descriptions of Black people being brutalized, with little ethical regard to their harmful effects. The Black press has historically challenged negative portrayals in the white media and shown more nuance, to protect the Black audience it represents. This dynamic underpins media depictions of racial violence still seen today. Darnella Frazier’s video capture of George Floyd’s death by Minneapolis police, was widely shared in the weeks following the incident, across …

Racial Terror Lynching In Northwest Arkansas: Recounting Of The Story Of Three Enslaved Males Lynched In 1856 In Washington County - Documentary, Obed Lamy

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While Northwest Arkansas is considered as diverse and progressive today, it also shares a common history of racial violence, and yet almost unknown, with the Southern United-States. Little is being said about the slave plantations in Elkins, racial cleansing in Springdale, or public spectacle lynchings in Fayetteville. This is because white people who hold political and economic power also control how history is written and decide what is to be learned from their perspectives. Marginalized communities, especially Black people, have not always had agency to tell their own stories. The lynchings of three enslaved males, Anthony, Aaron, and Randall, in …

Perspectives On Lynching In William Faulkner's Fiction And Nonfiction, Tabitha Fisher

Master’s Theses

This thesis analyzes William Faulkner's "Mob Sometimes Right" (1931), Light in August (1932), Intruder in the Dust (1948), and "Letter to the Leaders in the Negro Race" (1953) alongside recent critical perspectives for their depictions of lynching and black empowerment to determine Faulkner's racial narrative regarding racial violence and civil rights.

"Protest Literature" Or Race As A Social Construction: An Analysis Of Baldwin's Blues For Mister Charlie, Sonia Potter

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This article discusses James Baldwin's 1964 play Blues for Mister Charlie as it functions as a form of protest literature that aims to portray race as a social construction. It contextualizes itself with background on the 1955 murder of Emmett Till as it applies to the plot of the play, and it explores subjects of miscegenation, interracial mixing, and the role of the press in evoking societal change during the Civil Rights Movement.

Secrets On Morgan Hill: A Story Of An Unlikely Friendship Amid An Apartheid South, Camille Kleidysz-Ferreira

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

Introduction

The Burden of History and Fiction

“How much of the burden of history can fiction bear?” – Margaret Walker

Comprehensive historical research can often become the inspiration for art. The greatest pieces of historical fiction, are a result of years of historic scholarship before the creation of a compelling historical narrative or fiction piece. Through my two-year ethnographic study and collection of oral histories of the black community, surrounding the historic Bethel A.M.E. church in Acworth, Georgia, I was told a story about a friendship between two little girls who remained friends until the end of their lives. What …

The Unheard New Negro Woman: History Through Literature, Shantell Lee

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Many of the Harlem Renaissance anthologies and histories of the movement marginalize and omit women writers who played a significant role in it. They neglect to include them because these women worked outside of socially determined domestic roles and wrote texts that portrayed women as main characters rather than as muses for men or supporting characters. The distorted representation of women of the Renaissance will become clearer through the exploration of the following texts: Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, Caroline Bond Day’s “Pink Hat,” Dorothy West’s “Mammy,” Angelina Grimke’s Rachel and “Goldie,” and Georgia Douglas Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in …

Destroying Blackness One Body At A Time: Examining The Mediated Representations Of Lynchings Past And Present, Bethany Callan Nelson

Online Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the politics of racial violence in America. Lynchings have served as a means for controlling black communities since the end of the Civil War. For southerners, the model of the plantation economy had to be followed during industrialization in order to maintain social and economic hierarchies. This paper examines numerous aspects of lynchings and their legal justifications as foundational to modern police and vigilante killings. A critical race virtual ethnography was conducted to explore the similarities and differences between historical lynchings and the recent killings of black men in the media. I have outlined that there are …

Shaping Presence: Ida B. Wells’ 1892 Testimony Of The ‘Untold Story’ At New York’S Lyric Hall, Anita August

English Faculty Publications

Ida B. Wells stood before a crowd of the social hierarchy of black women from Boston, Brooklyn, New York City, and Philadelphia at New York’s Lyric Hall on October 5, 1892.

Wells’ 1892 testimonial, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, is the founding rhetorical text in the anti-lynching movement that called for a moral, religious, and legal referendum on lynching in America. By forsaking all of the commonplace rationale for lynching and the Southern social comfort that came with it, Wells reframed the simplistic characterizations of lynching with new questions to demonstrate its structural features. With the …

Introduction: Lynching, Incarceration’S Cousin: From Till To Trayvon, Barbara Lewis

Trotter Review

The wholesale criminalizing of the black male has been much in the news, put there by the Trayvon Martin case and the Florida verdict. (Incidentally, even though we don’t often think of it, Florida was where the first African slaves were installed in America, back in the 1500s in the city of St. Augustine.) As an academic, which, loosely translated means that I often bury my head between the covers of a book trying to figure out one thing or another, I am thought of as someone who is cautious and circumspect in what I think and write, but I …

Hank Willis Thomas:Branding Black Men - Identity & Violence Through Images Of Black Masculiinity, Nafisah Ayobola Raji

Nafisah Ayobola Raji

Branding black bodies in media adverts and hip hop is not alien to the 20th century popular culture. Identity as a fluid and constantly evolving binary is also a problematic in the American space.In this paper, I explore representations of Black men in media adverts with commercial intent or to canonize violence. Using photographic works of Hank Willis Thomas; "Branded series 2007" will show issues of identity & Violence in branded images of black bodies for commercialism, "Pitch Blackness 2008" will look at race and color stratification while "Rebranded series 2010" attempts a reinvention for the image of the Black …

Legal Punishment As Civil Ritual: Making Cultural Sense Of Harsh Punishment, Spearit

Articles

This work examines mass incarceration through a ritual studies perspective, paying explicit attention to the religious underpinnings. Conventional analyses of criminal punishment focus on the purpose of punishment in relation to legal or moral norms, or attempt to provide a general theory of punishment. The goals of this work are different, and instead try to understand the cultural aspects of punishment that have helped make the United States a global leader in imprisonment and execution. It links the boom in incarceration to social ruptures of the 1950s and 1960s and posits the United States’ world leader status as having more …

Referees' Reports, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Response to the essay, Wounds Not Scars: Lynching, the National Conscience, and the American Historian by Joel Williamson. Indiana: Organization of American Historians, 1997.

Omaha's Riot In Story And Picture, Educational Publishing Company

Digitized Books

No abstract provided.