African American Studies Commons^™

Opinion Editorial: When Will Our Lives Matter?, Jamar Ragland

College Student Affairs Leadership

When Will Our Lives Matter?

Opinion Editorial: Why Is It That So Many White People Fear Black Men?, Dmitri C. Westbrook

College Student Affairs Leadership

Why is it that so Many White People Fear Black Men?

Self-Realization In A Restricted World: Janie's Early Discovery In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Delisa D. Hawkes

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

Exploring The Efficacy Of "Crooked Sticks" : Diasporan Resistance And Discursive Ambivalence In Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine, Amy Schmidt

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Regennia N. Williams

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

Pentecostalism In An African Context, Michael L. Zadell

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

Zora Neale Hurston And Then Ishmael Reed: Syncretizing Moses With "Sympathetic" Comic Rhetoric, Gillian Johns

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

One School Year With Zora Neale Hurston: A September - June Timeline Unit For K - 8 Schools, Lana J. Miller

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

New Perspectives On Religion, Race, And Culture, Regennia N. Williams

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

From The Editor-In-Chief: A Celebration Of American Arts And Letters, Regennia N. Williams

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

Faculty In Print - Beyond The White Negro: Empathy And Anti-Racist Reading, Kimberly Chabot Davis

Bridgewater Review

Excerpt from Kimberly Chabot Davis, Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading (University of Illinois Press, 2014)

Contemporary Conversations On Cross-Cultural Exchange, Jenni L. Shelton

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

Covering The 1972 Chisholm Campaign: Shaping Perceptions And Postponing Progress, Andrea Diekman

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

In order to get their voices heard, groups with different interests and needs, often racially, socially, and economically marginalized groups, must take an active role in developing policies. Political representation is essential in articulating the need for change and then creating that change. Both women and African Americans have different significant problems gaining political office that their White male counterpoints do not. African American women are especially disadvantaged because of their challenges with the interlocking oppressions of both racism and sexism. A specific woman and candidacy that this study examines more closely was for the presidency. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm …

The Politics Of Black Womens' Hair, Vanessa King, Dieynaba Niabaly

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Historically, black women’s image has been subjected to high scrutinization that rendered every choice they made for their body and hair important. Black women have undergone many pressures that shaped their hair choices in various ways. However, there is a general tendency in the literature to homogenize all black women’s experiences and disregard their ethnic diversity. In this study, we explored both African and African American college women’s feelings about the motivations to straighten (relax) or wear their hair without chemical treatment (natural). For this qualitative approach, we utilized a cross-cultural approach and interviewed 12 African and African American college …

“Work What You Got”: Political Participation And Hiv-Positive Black Women’S Work To Restore Themselves And Their Communities, Monica L. Melton

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

Black women’s rates of HIV/AIDS infection have skyrocketed in comparison to other racial and ethnic groups over the past thirty years. Despite these rates, HIV-positive Black women’s perspectives are rarely sought regarding best practices to eradicate and interrupt HIV/AIDS among African American women, even though historically Black women have often proved phenomenal agents of social change. HIV-positive Black women’s activism has been understudied and input from the community in crisis has rarely been deemed as valuable to public health officials in HIV/AIDS prevention and interventions. Through the narratives of thirty HIV-positive Floridian Black women, I present HIV-positive Black women’s political …

Introduction: Appreciating Difference, Barbara Lewis

Trotter Review

Are we a narrative nation, imagined and connected mentally, tied by a common history of disruption if not by contiguous geography? Lorick-Wilmot suggests that the stories we tell offer the basis of mutual understanding across distance and cultures and generations. In a reconfigured mental Diasporic cartography, where is our citadel, our castle (not to be confused with what Europeans named as slave castles of Africa)? The remains and monuments built in this hemisphere by iron will and the drive to change yesterday, uprooting it from the ground of inequality, still stand on the highest hill in northern Haiti, reminding us …

Recent African Immigrants’ Fatherhood Experiences In America: The Changing Role Of Fathers, Zacharia N. Nchinda

Trotter Review

This article examines the lived experiences of recent African immigrant fathers in the United States. It focuses specifically on recent African immigrant fathers with African women as wives and children below the age of 18. Its aim is a better understanding of these fathers’ involvement in the life of their children and the changes immigration has forced upon the fathers. Information for the study emanates from interviews carried out with African immigrant fathers in the Milwaukee area, supplemented by my knowledge of African immigrant communities. The categorization of the data uses a construct established by the mid-1990s DADS Project initiative …

It’S In The Backbone: Dance From Africa Through The Diaspora, An Interview With Deama Battle, Deama Battle, Kenneth J. Cooper

Trotter Review

Classically trained in dance, DeAma Battle became interested in Africa-rooted dance in the 1960s. She started performing the traditional dances from Africa that spread, via the Atlantic slave trade, to the United States, the Caribbean, and South America. She not only has performed those steps and movements, Battle has studied them, with master dancers from West Africa, Brazil, Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba. One of her teachers and mentors was Chuck Davis, a leading African American teacher of traditional African dance. Her research has probed deeper, into the field abroad, on dance-study tours to Haiti, Jamaica, Ghana, Senegal, Morocco, and other …

Black Is Decidedly Not Just Black: A Case Study On Hiv Among African-Born Populations Living In Massachusetts, Chioma Nnaji, Nzinga Metzger

Trotter Review

Black or African American is a racial category that includes the descendants of enslaved Africans as well as members of foreign-born black communities who migrated to the United States from places abroad, such as Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Grouping native-born and foreign-born blacks into a single homogeneous racial category may make it easier to track disease and health outcomes; however, it masks the different cultural experiences, histories, languages, social and moral values, and expectations that influence health beliefs, attitudes, practices, and behaviors. It also ignores such factors as migration, which forces foreign-born populations to examine both their traditional …

Indians Once Roamed This Land…, Mwalim (Morgan James Peters)

Trotter Review

The sun sat high in the cloudless, early summer sky. Jerry held his breath as Ryan punched the gas, jumping onto Route 3 a few feet ahead of an incoming tractor-trailer. Ryan laughed as the angry truck driver blasted his air horn at them as the ’79 Aspen rocketed up the highway. The ramp onto Route 3 didn’t leave much room for traffic to merge; leaving the brave to shoot out onto the highway and the timid to sit and wait for an opening, often to the angry blaring of horns behind them, pushing them to jump onto the highway. …

Panoply: Haitian And Haitian-American Youth Crafting Identities In U.S. Schools, Fabienne Doucet

Trotter Review

In the United States, where race is a powerful factor for social stratification (Appiah & Gutmann, 1998; Glick-Schiller & Fouron, 1990a; Omni & Winant, 1986), foreign-born Blacks find themselves battling the demoralizing impacts of discrimination, racism, and xenophobia on a daily basis. In the school context, racist assumptions have been shown to predispose teachers to have lower expectations of immigrant students and other students of color, to view them more often as behavioral problems, and to assume that their parents do not value education (Doucet, 2008, 2011b; Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2008). At the same time, the powerful influence of …

Between Two Worlds: Stories Of The Second-Generation Black Caribbean Immigrant, Yndia S. Lorick-Wilmot

Trotter Review

People have an endless fascination with character information since it helps us to predict the behavior of those we interact with (King, Rumbaugh, and Savage-Rumbaugh 1999). Stories or narratives serve as an extension of this fascination. They help us make better decisions even without supplying immediate information. When we each talk about the past, our stories not only disclose currently relevant social particulars, but also provide tools for reasoning about action—our own and others’. In many instances, the stories we tell offer explanations of an outcome that resulted when we acted upon something—or serve as indirect memories of a place …

The Somali Diaspora In Greater Boston, Paul R. Camacho, Abdi Dirshe, Mohamoud Hiray, Mohamed J. Farah

Trotter Review

Our nation was founded on and thrives on immigration. One of the newest immigrant groups in the Boston area are Somalis. They are among the largest of the new populations of African immigrants. While precise numbers are very difficult to determine, there are approximately 8,000 in the Greater Boston area and another 2,000 estimated across the rest of Massachusetts. Very few studies have examined Somalis in the United States, and no studies exist on the community in Boston or Massachusetts.

It is an interesting sociological question to ask how similar the Somali experience has been in the United States (and …

When Parties Swap Platforms: The Changing Racial Policies Of Democrats And Republicans, Charles O. Boyd

Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research

This article examines the shift in the Democratic and Republican parties with regard to the rights of African Americans. Debunking partisan distortions of history on both sides, "When Parties Swap Platforms" demonstrates that prior to the 1960s, the Republican Party was more supportive of African Americans' rights and that during the 1960s, the Democratic Party became the more supportive institution. Evidence is also provided showing that Hubert Humphrey played a much larger role in changing the Democratic Party's stance on civil rights than is commonly known.

Freedmen With Firearms: White Terrorism And Black Disarmament During Reconstruction, David H. Schenk

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

The outcome of the Civil War brought freedom to over six million slaves of African descent. These Freedmen communities remained a critical source of labor for the agrarian based economy of the southern U.S. Conflicts erupted because former slaves sought to exercise their new freedoms against the restrictions placed on them by local authorities. New laws, mob actions and acts of organized white terrorism were used to subjugate free citizens and return them to their former stations of labor. Political activities and participation in the electoral process were violently discouraged. Vocal opponents of the new system were often targeted for …

The Essential Gospel Music Listening Library, Stephanie L. Barbee

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

Recent Scholarship On African American Religion, Marianne Nolan

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

From Praying Grounds To Spiritual Gifts, Jeffery Ivey

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

The Matrix Of African American Sacred Music In The 21st Century, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

This essay explores the praying grounds and contested terrains of African American sacred music in the twenty-first century. After presenting a womanist interdisciplinary methodology for experiencing and analyzing African American sacred music, the essay then (1) provides a socio-historical overview of the various types of music in the canopy of Black sacred music (2) examines selected music from several genres (3) analyzes some theological and ethical doctrines grounded in and emerging from particular musical selections and (4) offers reflections on some critical issues that are contested and need to inform music used in worship given emerging issues in African American …

Benjamin Banneker's Original Handwritten Document: Observations And Study Of The Cicada, Janet E. Barber, Asamoah Nkwanta

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Benjamin Banneker, farmer, mathematician, astronomer, and scientist, is known for his mathematical puzzles, ephemeris calculations, almanacs, his wooden clock, land surveying work, and famous letter on human rights. However, as a naturalist, his scientific and systematic observations of the cicadas are less known. In this paper we publicize Banneker’s naturalistic study of the seventeen-year periodic cycle of the cicada and make available the original handwritten document of his observations. We also introduce the audience of this journal to an intriguing natural problem involving prime numbers.