African American Studies Commons^™

Black Policemen In Jim Crow New Orleans, Vanessa Flores-Robert

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Although historians have done in-­‐depth researched on Black police in the South, before the Civil War and during Reconstruction, they seldom assess black policemen’s role in New Orleans between the Battle of Liberty Place and 1913. The men discussed here argue that despite the hardening racial attitudes in Post-­‐ Reconstruction South, in New Orleans opportunity still existed for Blacks to serve in positions of authority, perhaps a heritage of the city’s earlier tri-­‐partite racial order. The information obtained from primary sources such as police manuals, beat books, and newspapers, counters the widely held belief that African American presence in the …

Oscar James Dunn: A Case Study In Race & Politics In Reconstruction Louisiana, Brian Mitchell

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The study of African American Reconstruction leadership has presented a variety of unique challenges for modern historians who struggle to piece together the lives of men, who prior to the Civil War, had little political identity. The scant amounts of primary source data in regard to these leaders’ lives before the war, the destruction of many documents in regard to their leadership following the Reconstruction Era, and the treatment of these figures by historians prior to the Revisionist movement have left this body of extremely important political figures largely unexplored. This dissertation will examine the life of one of Louisiana’s …

American Commemorative Panels: Romare Bearden, United States Postal Service. Stamp Division

Rodney Lawrence Hurst, Sr. Stamp Collection

Informational pages for Romare Bearden Commemorative Stamp – American Commemorative Panels, includes images of the stamps, information about the physical stamp and biographical information for Romare Bearden. First issued September 28, 2011.

Black Heritage Stamp Series: Barbara Jordan, United States Postal Service. Stamp Division

Rodney Lawrence Hurst, Sr. Stamp Collection

Informational pages for Barbara Jordan Commemorative Stamp – Black Heritage Series, includes images of the stamps, information about the physical stamp and biographical information for Barbara Jordan. First issued September 16, 2011, 34th in a series.

Onyekwuluje, Anne B. (Sc 2473), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2473. Interviews conducted by Anne B. Onyekwuluje with seven individuals about the life and influence of Georgia Montgomery Davis Powers, the first woman elected to the Kentucky state Senate in 1963. They discuss their political relationships with Powers and her influence in politics and the Civil Rights movement.

"Is This The Fruit Of Freedom?" Black Civil War Veterans In Tennessee, Paul E. Coker

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the meaning of the Civil War in the South by examining the experience of Tennessee’s black Union army soldiers and veterans from the 1860s through the early twentieth century. Today historians almost reflexively agree that the black military experience took on an “ever larger meaning” in American society, but few scholars have given sustained attention to black soldiers’ lives in the postwar South. My dissertation finds that the black military experience profoundly disrupted Southern hierarchies and presented black men with unprecedented opportunities to elevate their political, economic, and social status; however, these aspirations rarely went uncontested. Nearly …

Locks And Cash: Whose Black History? (Part 2), John M. Rudy

Interpreting the Civil War: Connecting the Civil War to the American Public

A few weeks ago, the Hanover Evening Sun ran an article on the Lincoln Cemetery in Gettysburg and the locks which hang on its gates. This is by no means a new item of interest. The locks have girded the gates of the cemetery for three years. Still, the article (no longer on the Evening Sun's website but archived here in a PDF) raises a few interesting questions about the delicate balance between preservation and interpretation. [excerpt]

Locks And Cash: Whose Black History? (Part 1), John M. Rudy

Interpreting the Civil War: Connecting the Civil War to the American Public

The African-American Civil War Memorial has been a favorite site of mine in DC (and not simply because it's just down the block from the District's best restaurant, Ben's Chili Bowl). It is a monument in the right setting. Instead of being on the mall with the rest of the other monuments, to be easily overlooked like the DC World War I memorial or similar sidelights to the big three of Lincoln, Washington and Vietnam, the African American Civil War Memorial is in a community that can be moved by it. [excerpt]

‘Unkle Sommerset's’ Freedom: Liberty In England For Black Sailors, Charles R. Foy

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

With his 1772 decree in Somerset v. Steuart that slavery was ‘so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it [in England] but positive law’, Lord Mansfield altered the legal landscape regarding black rights in England. While earlier judicial decisions had implied that slaves who came to England were free, prior to the Somerset decision there was no judicial consensus on the issue. The Somerset decision did not decree that slavery was illegal in England. Yet many blacks believed it ‘emancipated’ any slave who reached the shores of England. This understanding, combined with the British military welcoming runaways into …

“A General State Of Terror”: The Enforcement Acts, The Ku Klux Klan, And The Struggle Over Education In The Post-Bellum South, Kathryn E. Murdock

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

"The Africans Have Taken Arkansas": Political Activities Of African-American Members Of The Arkansas Legislature, 1868-73, Christopher Warren Branam

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

African-American lawmakers in the Arkansas General Assembly during Radical Reconstruction became politically active at a time when the legislature was addressing the most basic issues of public life, such as creating the infrastructure of public education and transportation in the state. They were actively engaged in the work of the legislature. Between 1868 and 1873, they introduced bills that eventually became laws. Arkansas passed two civil rights laws at the behest of African-American lawmakers. Education, law and order, and economic development--issues that reflected the southern Republican agenda that dominated the state's politics between 1868 and Democratic Redemption in 1874--also drew …

Holstein, Otto, 1883-1934 (Sc 2433), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2433. Memorandum, 1 September 1917, to Brigade Commander of 1st Brigade, Kentucky Infantry from Otto Holstein, Captain, Signal Corps, and Provost Marshall of Lexington, Kentucky, reporting on an altercation between military police officers and African Americans. Includes a newspaper clipping about the incident.

Community Control: Civil Rights Resistance In The Mile High City, Summer Burke

Psi Sigma Siren

Black power in the late 1960s was once blamed for the fall of the civil rights movement. The more militant and abrasive black power approach was mistaken for the alternative civil rights movement, contradictory to the progressive approach of nonviolent marches in the South. However, recent scholarship contextualizing black power and the Black Panthers in particular, restructured this paradigm. This move toward a more inclusive approach to studying black resistance across the country steered The Movement out of the Memphis to Montgomery narrative, and instead provides a more textured understanding of black radicalism as a vital aspect of civil rights …

Migration, Community, And Stereotype: Shaping Racial Space In The Twentieth-Century Urban West, Stefani Evans

Psi Sigma Siren

African Americans who migrated to western cities in the twentieth century encountered a polyglot mix of Euro Americans, Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans. Diverse western populations dictated that western racial contests over space and power would evolve differently from those in the North or the South. This paper examines the discourse on white, Latino and African American racial landscapes in western cities through themes of migration, community formation, and white stereotypes and community responses to those stereotypes in seven key monographs and two articles published between 1993 and 2005.

"Go In De Wilderness": Evading The "Eyes Of Others" In The Slave Songs, Erik Nielson

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

This essay explores the trope of the wilderness in the slave spirituals, arguing that it functions to recreate symbolically the natural landscape into which slaves regularly took refuge in order to elude white surveillance. Drawing on a variety of sources, it considers the unique surveillance culture in the antebellum South, its effect on the everyday lives of the slaves, and the ways in which the slaves used their natural surroundings to avoid it. It then uses a close analysis of the song "Go in the Wilderness " as a point of departure for a broader discussion of the way the …

Cotter, Joseph Seaman, 1861-1949 (Sc 378), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 378. Letter, from Joseph S. Cotter, Louisville, Kentucky, to James Tandy Ellis, a fellow poet, which relates an incident of Cotter’s early life.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words - Nixon's Effect On School Desegregation, Demetri L. Morgan

Demetri L. Morgan, Ph.D.

A review of Preisdent Richard Nixon’s deeds rather than his rhetoric or policy stances, illuminates a previously under investigated reality that Nixon’s education civil rights record has been the most progressive and beneficial for the education of students of color to date. How can this be? As this presentation will outline, Nixon’s rhetoric and stances on education were symbolic measures to appease both the ‘silent majority’ and conservative southern democrats, which Nixon identified as vital to his election aspirations in the 1968 presidential campaign. This political ploy eventually collided with Nixon’s efforts to acquiesce to his campaign mantra and governing …

Whence Comes Black Art?: The Construction And Application Of “Black Motivation”, Derrell Acon

Lawrence University Honors Projects

George Schuyler, in his tragically misguided 1926 essay for The Nation magazine, “The Negro-Art Hokum,” suggests that the only difference between Blacks and Whites is the color of skin, and that both races experience the same social, psychological and educational forces in America. He blatantly disregards American racism and inequality, and in his attempt to put forth his advocacy of color-blindness he merely projects and perpetuates the most racist of ideals within our country. Schuyler views the concept of Black Art very narrowly and insists on the impossibility of such an idea because of the supposed Americanness of the art. …

Detroit Blues Women, Michael Duggan Murphy

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

DETROIT BLUES WOMEN

by

Michael Duggan Murphy

August 2011

Advisor: Dr. John J. Bukowczyk

Major: History

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

"Detroit Blues Women" explores how African American "women's blues" survived the twentieth century relatively unscripted by the image-makers of the male-dominated music industry. In the 1920s, African American blues queens laid out a foundation for assertive and rebellious women's blues that the many musical heirs who succeeded them in the twentieth century and into the first decade of the twenty first century sustained, preserved and built upon. The dissertation argues that women's blues, which encouraged women to liberate themselves …

The Angel And The Imp: The Duncan Sisters’ Performances Of Race And Gender, Jocelyn Buckner

Theatre Faculty Articles and Research

From 1923 to 1959 Vivian and Rosetta Duncan performed the show Topsy and Eva in front of thousands of audiences in the United States and abroad. This essay examines how the Duncan Sisters’ appropriation of blackness through a yin and yang performance of black and white womanhood, their sexualized but ultimately infantilizing routine as young girls, and their take on anarchistic comedy resulted in a particular spin on age, gender, race, and sexuality that reinforced their privilege as white women even while it pushed the boundaries of acceptable femininity in the swiftly shifting American culture of the first half of …

Church Burnings, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

On 15 September 1963 a bomb exploded in the basement of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. The ensuing fire and death of four little girls placed the violence of white supremacy on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. It also entered the 16^th Street Church into a long history of attacks against houses of worship in the American South. Though churches burn for any number of reasons, including accident and insurance fraud, church arson in southern culture has frequently been associated with a symbolic assault on a community’s core institution.

C.C Spaulding & R.R Wright---Companions On The Road Less Traveled?: A Reconsideration Of African American International Relations In The Early Twentieth Century, Brandon R. Byrd

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Bondage On The Border: Slaves And Slaveholders In Tazewell County, Virginia, Laura Lee Kerr

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Armstrong, Louis; Ball, James Presley; Bates, Daisy; Batiste, Alvin; Blair, Henry C.; Bolin, Jane; Carmichael, Stokley; Chaney, James; Cheaham, Henry Plummer; Cochran Jr., Johhnie L.; Davenport, Willie; Dickerson, Eric; Evans, James Carmichael; Forman, James; Harris, Franco; Hawkins, Connie; Iverson, Allen; Lawrence Jr., Robert H.; Mays, Benjamin E.; Nixon, E.D.; Peete, Rodney; Sanders, Barry; Toomer, Jean; Walters, Alexander; And Yerby, Frank G., Howard Bromberg

Book Chapters

Contributions by Howard J. Bromberg to Great Lives from History: African Americans, a collection of short biographical essays.