African American Studies Commons^™

Black Expressive Art, Resistant Cultural Politics, And The [Re] Performance Of Patriotism, Deborah Elizabeth Whaley

Trotter Review

During World War I, the Boston editor William Monroe Trotter described black American patriotism as a cautious endeavor and America's willingness to participate in the World War while it turned its back on domestic issues as misguided. In an era when freedom bypassed most black women and men within the nation-state of America and in an era of mass lynching in the American South, he proclaimed that black Americans and the U.S. government might refocus their efforts on making the world safer for "Negroes."

Like William Monroe Trotter, the rap group Public Enemy's rap odyssey "Welcome to the Terrordome," from …

A Historical Overview Of Poverty Among Blacks In Boston, 1950-1990, Robert C. Hayden

Trotter Review

Like most nineteenth-century residents of Boston, blacks worked hard to maintain their homes and families. Even before the Civil War, both enslaved and free blacks in "freedom's birthplace" worked long and arduous hours. Those who migrated to Boston from the South in the 1800s had come to secure higher wages, mobility, and opportunity for themselves and their families. Boston's black population grew from 2,000 in 1850 to 8,125 in 1890, and to 11,591 by 1900. In 1900, 39 percent of black Bostonians were northern-born (New England, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania), and 53 percent were southern-born.

Residential segregation for …

Pastor Brunson's Shofar, Richard Tenorio

Trotter Review

A short story by Richard Tenorio of sibling love and sacrificed ambition, which is set in Roxbury, traditionally the twentieth-century home territory for blacks in Boston. Today, Roxbury is poised on the lip of gentrification, and blacks in Boston are on the move again, seeking home and security and belonging.

Introduction, Barbara Lewis

Trotter Review

The Trotter Review, which has been published for over fifteen years, is entering a new phase. That is what the current issue represents, a marriage of old and new, a branching out into expanded territory that does not betray, we hope, the ideals or principles of the past.

What we have put together is historical and cultural and political. We raise questions. We draw connections and provide context as we focus on the local, the national, the international, and the diasporic. In addition, we give cognizance to the literary, as an expression of the urge to order the real, …

Madre Patria (Mother Country): Latino Identity And Rejections Of Blackness, Marta I. Cruz-Janzen

Trotter Review

When I was in third grade, in Puerto Rico, I wanted to be the Virgin Mary for the community Christmas celebration. A teacher promptly informed me that the mother of Christ could not be black. A girl with blonde hair and blue eyes was selected for the role, and I was given the role of a shepherd. In middle school, also in Puerto Rico, I played a house servant for a school play. Only children of black heritage played the slaves and servants. A white student with a painted face portrayed the only significant black character. All the other characters …

Race In Feminism: Critiques Of Bodily Self-Determination In Ida B. Wells And Anna Julia Cooper, Stephanie Athey

Trotter Review

If, as Angela Davis has argued, "the last decade of the nineteenth century was a critical moment in the development of modern racism," the same can be said of the development of modern feminism. Late nineteenth-century feminism, like institutional racism, saw "major institutional supports and ideological justifications" take shape across this period. Organizations of American women, both black and white, were shaping political arguments and crafting activist agendas in a post-Reconstruction America increasingly enamored of hereditary science, prone to lynching, and possessed of a virulent nationalism. This essay takes a historical view of "womanhood," bodily self-determination and well-being, concepts now …