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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
“It Is Time For Artists To Be Heard”: Artists And Writers For Freedom, 1963–1964, Judith E. Smith
“It Is Time For Artists To Be Heard”: Artists And Writers For Freedom, 1963–1964, Judith E. Smith
American Studies Faculty Publication Series
In The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, James Smethurst writes that “Black arts cultural nationalism draws on a long history.” He describes the cultural nationalist stance we associate with Black Arts as involving a concept of liberation and self-determination that entails some notion of the development or recovery of a “true” national culture,” conveying “an already existing folk or popular culture,” often relying on recognizable African elements. Black arts cultural nationalism expressed the linkages between Black Arts and Black Power even before they were specifically named and identified. In particular, Black arts cultural nationalism …
The Rape Of Recy Taylor [Film Review], Judith E. Smith
The Rape Of Recy Taylor [Film Review], Judith E. Smith
American Studies Faculty Publication Series
Nancy Buirksi’s documentary The Rape of Recy Taylor centers on a brutal sexual assault in Abbeville, Alabama in 1944. A 24-year-old African American wife and mother, coming home from a sanctified church service with a friend and her son, was forced into a car at gunpoint, and gang raped by six young white men. The beating heart of the film is the on-screen testimony of Taylor’s younger brother, Robert Corbitt, and her younger sister, Alma Daniels, who convey the unspeakably cruel and vicious character of the attack: Corbitt repeats the perpetrators’ directions to Recy: “They said they wanted her to …
The Making Of A Raisin In The Sun, Judith E. Smith
The Making Of A Raisin In The Sun, Judith E. Smith
American Studies Faculty Publication Series
Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun premiered on the Broadway stage in January 1959 just as the edifice of national segregation was cracking open. Response to the momentous 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Bd. of Education included both the important early challenges to long-accepted practices of white supremacy and the intensified mobilization of widespread white defiance to the ruling. Black Bus boycotters in Montgomery, Alabama, and their young minister leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Black high school students attempting to attend Little Rock’s Central High and their families faced organized harassment and dangerous forms …
Neutral Ground Or Battleground? Hidden History, Tourism, And Spatial (In)Justice In The New Orleans French Quarter, Lynnell L. Thomas
Neutral Ground Or Battleground? Hidden History, Tourism, And Spatial (In)Justice In The New Orleans French Quarter, Lynnell L. Thomas
American Studies Faculty Publication Series
In 2017, the city of New Orleans removed four monuments that paid homage to the city’s Confederate past. The removal came after contentious public debate and decades of intermittent grassroots protests. Despite the public process, details about the removal were closely guarded in the wake of death threats, vandalism, lawsuits, and organized resistance by monument supporters. Workers hired to dismantle the monuments did so surreptitiously under the cloak of darkness, protected by a heavy police presence, with their faces covered to conceal their identities. The divisiveness of this debate and the removal lay bare the contestation over public space, historical …