African American Studies Commons^™

Piercing The Prison Uniform Of Invisibility For Black Female Inmates, Michelle S. Jacobs

Michelle S Jacobs

In Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women In Prison, Professor Paula Johnson has written about the most invisible of incarcerated women — incarcerated African American women. The number of women incarcerated in the United States increased by seventy-five percent between 1986 and 1991. Of these women, a disproportionate number are black women. The percentages vary by region and by the nature of institution (county jail, state prison or federal facility), but the bottom line remains the same. In every instance, black women are incarcerated at rates disproportionate to their percentage in the general population. In Inner Lives, Professor Johnson …

Ruby Dee, 1922-2014, Judith Smith

Judith E. Smith

Ruby Dee was a marvelously expressive actor, and a lifelong risk-taking radical committed to challenging racial and economic inequality. She made history as part of an extraordinary group of Black Arts radicals — including Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Belafonte, John O. Killens and Julian Mayfield, as well as her husband Ossie Davis — who actively protested white supremacy and thought deeply about the political implications of conventional racial representations, creating new stories and introducing new Black characters to convey deep truths about Black life.

In small parts and choice roles, Dee’s presence lit up stage and screen. In her …

Review Of Demands Of The Dead In American Literary History, Katy Ryan

Katy Ryan

No abstract provided.

Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical, Judith Smith

Judith E. Smith

A son of poor Jamaican immigrants who grew up in Depression-era Harlem, Harry Belafonte became the first black performer to gain artistic control over the representation of African Americans in commercial television and film. Forging connections with an astonishing array of consequential players on the American scene in the decades following World War II—from Paul Robeson to Ed Sullivan, John Kennedy to Stokely Carmichael—Belafonte established his place in American culture as a hugely popular singer, matinee idol, internationalist, and champion of civil rights, black pride, and black power.

In Becoming Belafonte, Judith E. Smith presents the first full-length interpretive …

Ferguson, The Black Radical Tradition And The Path Forward, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua

Sundiata K Cha-Jua

The Ferguson rebellion is an inchoate manifestation of the roiling turbulent dark water of African American resistance to white supremacy and capitalist exploitation. Will it become more? Will the young activists become politically conscious and organized? Will the youth whose dogged strength has kept the rebellion alive transform themselves into radicals and their struggle into a battle for power? It’s unclear; therefore, I don’t condemn it. It’s too soon to tell what it means in the flow history. However, professor Ashley Howard reminds us that what’s been called riots are merely the tactics of the most marginal and alienated sectors …

Ferguson, The Black Radical Tradition And The Path Forward, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua

Sundiata K Cha-Jua

Can't you feel it? Feel the temperature dropping? Feel the icy winds blowing? It’s winter in America. Spring and fall seem to have enveloped summer. The chill comes sooner and lasts longer. It’s winter in America. There’s a blizzard coming. The first frost has already fallen, in Ferguson, Missouri, of all places. Ferguson has ripped the veil off. It is now clear for the world to see how the U.S. plans to deal with its black internal colony.

It’s getting dark; it’s nearly midnight. Yes, repressive episodes will continue to increase in frequency and grow in intensity. It’s nearly midnight. …

Desire And Disaster In New Orleans: Tourism, Race, And Historical Memory, Lynnell Thomas

Lynnell Thomas

Most of the narratives packaged for New Orleans's many tourists cultivate a desire for black culture—jazz, cuisine, dance—while simultaneously targeting black people and their communities as sources and sites of political, social, and natural disaster. In this timely book, the Americanist and New Orleans native Lynnell L. Thomas delves into the relationship between tourism, cultural production, and racial politics. She carefully interprets the racial narratives embedded in tourist websites, travel guides, business periodicals, and newspapers; the thoughts of tour guides and owners; and the stories told on bus and walking tours as they were conducted both before and after Katrina. …

Blues People Final Curriculum Guide.Pdf, Vincent L. Stephens

Vincent L Stephens

Environmental Justice And Health: An Analysis Of Persons Of Color Injured At The Work Place, Jennifer Schoenfish-Keita, Glenn Johnson

Glenn S Johnson

Occupational and environmental hazards have a direct impact on people of color lives. People of color are disproportionately employed in the dirtiest and low-paying jobs in the United States. This study investigates workplace safety for persons of color from the analysis of three personal injury cases. These personal injury cases include two African-American females and one African American male who were killed or severely injured as a result of their job or the type of transportation they used trying to get to their place of work. The authors use the Environmental Justice Framework to examine how persons of color are …

Maya Angelou, Poet, Activist And Singular Storyteller, Dies At 86

Joanne Braxton

An Intensely Sympathetic Awareness: Experiential Similarity And Cultural Norms As Means For Gaining Older African Americans’ Trust Of Scientific Research, Myra Sabir

Myra Sabir

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

Anita August

I will examine Wells’ 1892 testimony at Lyric Hall using an interdisciplinary reading from rhetorical theory, legal brief writing, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and historical criticism to illustrate how these bodies of knowledge discursively intersect and interact in articulating the shaping presence of the agent. I will distinguish my notion of a shaping presence in five ways in which it acts as a rhetorical framing of both the agent and her visual and verbal discourse.

Introduction: The War On U.S. Blacks, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua

Sundiata K Cha-Jua

The war on black people seeks to push them back to a role, status, position, and representation more akin to the 1950s, if not the 1890s. There are several fronts in the war on Afro-America. These fronts take the particular form of the social categories of class, gender, and generation. The marginalization of blacks from the labor force, nullification of hard-won civil rights protections, mass race-based incarceration, and the growing resurgence in white supremacy evidenced partly by the mass arming of the U.S. white population signal the existence of a war on black America.

We Believe It Was Murder, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua

Sundiata K Cha-Jua

This paper explores how Black men in Champaign-Urbana Illinois mobilized the Black community’s critical social capital to respond to what many believe was the murder of Kiwane by either Officer Norbits, or Chief Finney, as Manning-Carter claimed. I argue that the men in the NORTH END BREAKFAST CLUB responded to what they believed was the murder of Kiwane Carrington in a variety of civic engagement activities that sought to mobilize the community’s transformative resistant capital to variously expand critical Black social consciousness, organize Black men into a militant social force, and mobilize the community to resist anti-black racial oppression across …

The Young White Faces Of Slavery, Mary Niall Mitchell

Mary Niall Mitchell

No abstract provided.

In Search Of Progressive Black Masculinities, Keon M. Mcguire, Jonathan Berhanu, Charles H.F. Davis Iii, Shaun R. Harper Phd

Charles H.F. Davis III

During the last several decades, research concerning the developmental trajectories, experiences, and behaviors of college men as ‘‘gendered’’ persons has emerged. In this article, we first critically review literature on Black men’s gender development and expressions within college contexts to highlight certain knowledge gaps. We then conceptualize and discuss progressive Black masculinities by relying on Mutua’s germinal work on the subject. Further, we engage Black feminist scholarship, both to firmly situate our more pressing argument for conceptual innovation and to address knowledge gaps in the literature on Black men’s gender experiences. It is our belief that scholars who study gender …

“What Did She See?” The White Gaze And Postmodern Triple Consciousness In Walter Dean Myers’S Monster, Tim Engles, Fern Kory

Tim Engles

No abstract provided.

Black Love Bibliography, Stephanie Y. Evans Phd

Stephanie Y. Evans PhD

Clark Atlanta University graduate students in the Spring 2014 Africana Women’s Studies seminar created this “Black Love Bibliography” to share. We are pleased to offer this groundbreaking introduction to a vastly under-defined area of inquiry and discussion.

Focusing on the seminar theme, “researching Black love,” seven students collected citations that informed their final papers about race, gender, and definitions of self-love, intimate love, social love, and altruism or universal love. In a course designed to highlight the history, cultural diversity, contributions, and approaches to Africana Women's Studies, students conducted multi-disciplinary investigations of social sciences and humanities regarding race, gender, and …

Being Black Academic Mothers, Angela Lewis, Sherri Wallace, Clarissa Peterson

Sherri L. Wallace

An Intersectional Social Capital Analysis Of The Influence Of Historically Black Sororities On African American Women’S College Experiences At A Predominantly White Institution, Lindsay A. Greyerbiehl, Donald Mitchell Jr.

Donald Mitchell Jr., Ph.D.

A Curriculum Guide To Teaching And Discussing: Stomping The Blues (1976) By Albert Murray, Vincent L. Stephens

Vincent L Stephens

The Curriculum Guide is a comprehensive resource for educators seeking to use Albert Murray’s classic reflection on blues and jazz, Stomping the Blues in a classroom setting. The Guide includes summaries of each individual chapter and a listing of critical themes embedded in the chapter, a list of discussion questions, and a supplemental bibliography featuring reviews and essays on Stomping the Blues, and a resource for Murray’s additional writing on the blues genre. The Guide was funded by a grant awarded to scholar Vincent Stephens by Bucknell University's Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender (CSREG) in the …