African American Studies Commons^™

The Integration Of African Americans In The Civilian Conservation Corps In Massachusetts, Caitlin E. Pinkham

Graduate Masters Theses

The Civilian Conservation Corps employed young white and black men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. In 1935 Robert Fechner, the Director of the Civilian Conservation Corps, ordered the segregation of Corps camps across the country. Massachusetts’ camps remained integrated due in large part to low funding and a small African American population. The experiences of Massachusetts’ African American population present a new general narrative of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Federal government imposed a three percent African American quota, ensuring that African Americans participated in Massachusetts as the Civilian Conservation Corps expanded. This quota represents a Federal acknowledgement …

Race Patriots: Black Poets, Transnational Identity, And Diasporic Versification In The United States Before The New Negro, Jason T. Hendrickson

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the contributions of black poets in the United States before the New Negro / Harlem Renaissance Movement. Specifically, it focuses on their role in creating and maintaining a tradition of regional transnationalism in their verses that celebrates their African ancestry. I contend that these poets are best understood as “race patriots”; that is, they at once sought inclusion within the nation-state in the form of full citizenship, yet recognized allegiances beyond the nation-state on account of race through a recognition of shared African ancestry across borders. Their verses point to a shared kinship – be it through …

Creating The Ideal Mexican: 20th And 21st Century Racial And National Identity Discourses In Oaxaca, Savannah N. Carroll

Doctoral Dissertations

This investigation intends to uncover past and contemporary socioeconomic significance of being a racial other in Oaxaca, Mexico and its relevance in shaping Mexican national identity. The project has two purposes: first, to analyze activities and observations of cultural missionaries in Oaxaca during the 1920s and 1930s, and second to relate these findings to historical and present implications of blackness in an Afro-Mexican community. Cultural missionaries were appointed by the Secretary of Public Education (SEP) to create schools throughout Mexico, focusing on the modernization of marginalized communities through formal and social education. This initiative was intended to resolve socioeconomic disparities …

To "Plant Our Trees On American Soil, And Repose Beneath Their Shade": Africa, Colonization, And The Evolution Of A Black Identity Narrative In The United States, 1808-1861, Edward Jason Vickers

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work explores the role that ideas about Africa played in the development of a specifically American identity among free blacks in the United States, from the early nineteenth century to the Civil War. Previous studies of the writings of free blacks in the Revolutionary period, and of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which was devoted to removing them back to an African homeland, have suggested that black discussions of Africa virtually disappeared after 1816, when the colonization movement began. However, as this work illustrates, the letters, books, newspapers, and organizational records produced by free blacks in the antebellum era …

Slavery Reparations, Kristen Gatens

Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? (Class of 2019)

As part of the English 101.003 Writing Seminar taught by Dr. Anne Porter in Fall 2015 at Providence College, this essay was written in response to an assignment to articulate a central question about slavery reparations. The essay explores the question from various angles and makes reference to Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? by Michael J. Sandel, “The Case for Reparations” from The Atlantic (June 2014) by Ta-Nehisi Coates, as well as at least one additional, scholarly source. The essay is written for college-age readers, who are interested in the issue and asking the same questions.

Abstract: In …

Forty Acres And Unfulfilled Promises, Julia Rizza

Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? (Class of 2019)

As part of the English 101.003 Writing Seminar taught by Dr. Anne Porter in Fall 2015 at Providence College, this essay was written in response to an assignment to articulate a central question about slavery reparations. The essay explores the question from various angles and makes reference to Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? by Michael J. Sandel, “The Case for Reparations” from The Atlantic (June 2014) by Ta-Nehisi Coates, as well as at least one additional, scholarly source. The essay is written for college-age readers, who are interested in the issue and asking the same questions.

Abstract: In …

Reparations For Modern Day Inequalities, Deneysha Riley

Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? (Class of 2019)

As part of the English 101.003 Writing Seminar taught by Dr. Anne Porter in Fall 2015 at Providence College, this essay was written in response to an assignment to articulate a central question about slavery reparations. The essay explores the question from various angles and makes reference to Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? by Michael J. Sandel, “The Case for Reparations” from The Atlantic (June 2014) by Ta-Nehisi Coates, as well as at least one additional, scholarly source. The essay is written for college-age readers, who are interested in the issue and asking the same questions.

Abstract: My …

Warren County, Kentucky - Tax Records (Mss 548), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 548. Bound volume recording local taxes paid by residents of Warren County, Kentucky for 1939. Includes names and addresses of both white and African American residents.

"Portraits Of Freedom" Opening Reception And Art Exhibition Grant Report For Humanities Texas, Kyle Ainsworth

Librarian and Staff Publications

The Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, on behalf of the East Texas Research Center (ETRC), Ralph W. Steen Library, Stephen F. Austin State University (SFA), was awarded a Humanities Texas mini-grant to provide programming for the opening reception of the Portraits of Freedom art exhibition, June 11, 2015. A $1,000 grant from Humanities Texas paid the honoraria for two guest speakers, Dr. Douglas Chambers from the University of Southern Mississippi and Dr. Daina Berry from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Chambers spoke about runaway slaves in the Atlantic World and Dr. Berry about Juneteenth and the Civil …

2016 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Breakfast Celebration, University Of Maine Student Life

Cultural Affairs Distinguished Lecture Series

Alison Beyea is the Executive Director of the ACLU of Maine, where she oversees the organization's legal, legislative, public education and development activities. With 3,000 members, the ACLU of Maine is the state's oldest and largest civil liberties organization.

The state of the union from the Citizen's Perspective delivered by Alison Beyea will be the focus of a keynote address at the 20th annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Breakfast on Jan. 18, 2016 sponsored by the Greater Bangor Area NAACP and the University of Maine. Keynote Speaker Alison Beyea will speak on current national affairs and trends, education, …

The "Unfinished Work:" The Civil War Centennial And The Civil Rights Movement, Megan A. Sutter

Student Publications

The Civil War Centennial celebrations fell short of a great opportunity in which Americans could reflect on the legacy of the Civil War through the racial crisis erupting in their nation. Different groups exploited the Centennial for their own purposes, but only the African Americans and civil rights activists tried to emphasize the importance of emancipation and slavery to the memory of the war. Southerners asserted states’ rights in resistance to what they saw as a black rebellion in their area. Northerners reflected back on the theme of reconciliation, prevalent in the seventy-fifth anniversary of the war. Unfortunately, those who …

Residential Segregation In Norfolk, Virginia: How The Federal Government Reinforced Racial Division In A Southern City, 1914-1959, Kevin Lang Ringelstein

History Theses & Dissertations

This thesis examines how Norfolk, Virginia maintained residential segregation between the years 1914, when the city passed its first segregation ordinance, and 1959, when it received the All-America City Award for its massive slum clearance projects. By focusing on federal government initiatives in Norfolk, it shows that Norfolk’s leaders used the federal government’s assistance to map, analyze, and remove the city’s African American slums. Ultimately, it highlights the central role the federal government played in perpetuating residential segregation in Norfolk and how it opened a space for Norfolk’s leaders to act on their prejudice.

This thesis demonstrates that in the …

More Than A Game: The Legacy Of Black Baseball, Tara Moriarty

Kaleidoscope

Out of a segregated and persecuted black society, the Negro Leagues arose to provide a form of business, entertainment, and charity. The leagues served as a form of uplift within the race and as a tool to bring blacks together within their communities. In 1945, with the signing of Jackie Robinson to Montreal, baseball became a vehicle for integration. While Robinson broke the color line in professional baseball, he simultaneously broke the Negro Leagues. Black fans abandoned black baseball and turned to the Major Leagues to watch Robinson. Although the integration of baseball was the first major victory for integration …

Sharing Authority And Agency: A Multilogue Response To Goldenberg’S “Youth Historians In Harlem,” Part 2 Of 2, Jack Dougherty

Education's Histories

Jack Dougherty (Trinity College) provides a multilogue response to Part 2 of Barry M. Goldenberg's Youth Historians in Harlem series.

The Physical Uplift Of The Race: The Emergence Of The African American Physical Culture Movement, 1900-1930, J. Anthony Guillory

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation, “The Physical Uplift of the Race: The Emergence of the African American Physical Culture Movement, 1900—1930,” situates the early twentieth century of African American physical culture within a historical narrative that shaped philosophical viewpoints of African American urban community development. Previous inquiries of related topics attempt to describe a physical culture movement that was somehow separate and apart from the larger historical narrative of African people in the United States. My work does not continue in that vein. My objective is to illustrate how the black physical culture movement was primarily a reaction to African Americans’ new geo-political …

Imaging Her Selves: Black Women Artists, Resistance, Image And Representation, 1938-1956, Heather Zahra Caldwell

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses specifically on dancer Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), pianist Hazel Scott (1920-1981), cartoonist Jackie Ormes (1911-1985), singer Lena Horne (1917-2010), and graphic artist, painter, and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012). It explores the artistic, performative, and political resistance deployed by these five African-American women activists, artists, and performers in the period between 1937 and 1957. The principal form of resistance employed by these women was cultural resistance. Using a mixture of archival research, first person interview, biography, as well as other primary and secondary sources, I explore how these women constructed personas, representations, and media images of African-American women to …

A Half Century Later, We Need The Voting Rights Act More Than Ever, Jill Ogline Titus

Civil War Institute Faculty Publications

Two years ago, the Supreme Court determined that voter discrimination is a thing of the past. The Court's decision to gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act ensures that this summer's 50^thanniversary commemoration is an ironic one.

We needed the legislation in 1965, the Court argued in its 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down the formula that made the act enforceable, but we don't anymore. [excerpt]

'Grounding' Walter Rodney In Critical Pedagogy: Toward Praxis In African History, Seneca Vaught

South

This essay attempts to address the dilemma of theory and praxis, what Freire referred to as “mere verbalism,” by examining one historical instance of critical pedagogy in history education. This essay argues that Walter Rodney’s curriculum, as detailed in his syllabi on “Historians and Revolutions” and "Groundings," helps educators better understand how to more effectively bridge the gap between a critical pedagogical theory and praxis in African history. Using Rodney as an example of a critical pedagogy theorist and practitioner, this essay explores how concerned historians (and those who use history as a basis for teaching) can traverse traditional disciplinary …

The Unheard New Negro Woman: History Through Literature, Shantell Lee

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Many of the Harlem Renaissance anthologies and histories of the movement marginalize and omit women writers who played a significant role in it. They neglect to include them because these women worked outside of socially determined domestic roles and wrote texts that portrayed women as main characters rather than as muses for men or supporting characters. The distorted representation of women of the Renaissance will become clearer through the exploration of the following texts: Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, Caroline Bond Day’s “Pink Hat,” Dorothy West’s “Mammy,” Angelina Grimke’s Rachel and “Goldie,” and Georgia Douglas Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in …

Creating The Black California Dream: Virna Canson And The Black Freedom Struggle In The Golden State’S Capital, 1940-1988, Kendra M. Gage

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation examines the black struggle for racial equality in the Golden State’s capital from 1940-1988 and an integral leader of the movement, Virna Canson. Canson fought for nearly fifty years to dismantle discriminatory practices in housing, education, employment and worked to protect consumers. Her lifetime of activism reveals a different set of key issues people focused on at the grassroots level and shows how the fight for freedom in California differed from the South because the state’s discriminatory practices were harder to pinpoint. Her work and the larger black community’s activism in Sacramento also reveals how the black freedom …

Comfortable Inaction, In Action, Mike Suarez

Education's Histories

Mike Suarez reviews Dionne Danns' (2014) Desegregating Chicago's Public Schools: Policy Implementation, Politics, and Protest, 1965-1985.

A Light In Darkness, Oscar Micheaux: Entrepreneur Intellectual Agitator, Airic Hughes

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Oscar Micheaux was a luminary who served as an agent of racial uplift, with a unique message to share with the world on behalf of the culturally marginalized African Americans. He produced projects that conveyed the complexity of the true black experience with passion and creative courage. His films empowered black audiences and challenged conventional stereotypes of black culture and potential. The legacy of Oscar Micheaux is historically unparalleled among his contemporaries. He transcended traditionally held perspectives about what black people could accomplish. The consciousness within his work still heavily influences black entertainment today. This study seeks to add to …

Carter G. Woodson: The Early Years, 1875 – 1903, Burnis Morris

Burnis R. Morris

When Carter G. Woodson departed West Virginia in 1903 for the Philippines and other distant datelines, few people other than Woodson himself could have imagined his final destination. He would eventually enjoin millions to follow his lead in promoting African Americans’ contributions in history; however, the scholarly people in Washington, where he settled in 1909, laughed at him and predicted failure.

Race, Labor, And Migration: The Legacy Of The Fepc And Puget Sound Navy Yard, Aaron Chapman

History Undergraduate Theses

This paper is an exploration of the experiences of black workers at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard during the Second World War. The primary focus is on the immediate effects of President Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802 and Fair Employment Practices Commission, especially discrimination experiences of black workers. However, long-term effects such as migration out of the heavily segregated south and Civil Rights Movement precursors are also emphasized.

Narratives Of Interiority: Black Lives In The U.S. Capital, 1919 - 1942, Paula C. Austin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation constructs an urban, social and intellectual history of poor and working class African Americans in the interwar period in Washington, D.C. Although the advent of social history shifted scholarly emphasis onto the "ninety-nine percent," many scholars have framed black history as the story of either the educated, uplifted and accomplished elite, or of a culturally depressed monolithic urban mass in need of the alleviation of structural obstacles to advancement. A history of the poor and working class as individuals with both ideas and subjectivity has often been difficult simply because there are limited archival sources.

"Narratives of Interiority" …

Broad Shoulders, Hidden Voices: The Legacy Of Integration At New Orleans' Benjamin Franklin High School, Graham S. Cooper

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This paper seeks to insert the voices of students into the historical discussion of public school integration in New Orleans. While history tends to ignore the memories of children that experienced integration firsthand, this paper argues that those memories can alter our understanding of that history. In 1963, Benjamin Franklin High School was the first public high school in New Orleans to integrate. Black students knowingly made sacrifices to transfer to Ben Franklin, as they were socially and politically conscious teenagers. Black students formed alliances with some white teachers and students to help combat the racist environment that still dominated …

Documenting Ferguson: Capturing History As It Happens, Sonya Rooney, Jennifer Kirmer

University Libraries Presentations

This poster chronicles a novel archive project—the Documenting Ferguson Project at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL). Our poster highlighted our steps in the documentation and preservation of materials created in the course of and surrounding events in Ferguson, Missouri following the shooting death of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014. WUSTL created a committee, consisting of University Archives and other library staff, faculty, and additional university staff, to coordinate the efforts to capture the history as it happened. The Documenting Ferguson Project Team was called together in August 2014, soon after the death of Michael Brown and the first …

Constructing National Memory: The Problematics Of Resistance & Remembrance In The Wpa Slave Narrative Collections, Nathan A. Moore

Library Student Employees' Research

No abstract provided.

Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the legal construction and development of racial difference as considered in literature written or set during the final years of American slavery. While there had consistently been a conceptual correspondence between black skin and enslavement, race or racial difference did not become the unqualified explanation of enslavement until fairly late in the institution’s history. Specifically, as slavery’s stability became increasingly threatened through the nineteenth century by abolitionism and racial slippage, race became the singular and explicit rationale for its existence and perpetuation. I argue that the primary discourse of this justificatory rationale was legal: through law race …

“Servants, Obey Your Masters”: Southern Representations Of The Religious Lives Of Slaves, Lindsey K.D. Wedow

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

This paper focuses on how representations of the religious lives of slaves, specifically their abilities to comprehend the Bible and flourish spiritually, became an issue that not only propelled the North and South toward the Civil War, but also perpetuated the conflict. Using original documents from the collections housed at Chicago’s Newberry Library, predominantly sermons written by proslavery ministers as well as documents published by missionary organizations, this paper explores the fierce defense of the institution of slavery mounted by proslavery Christians. Specifically, this paper’s interest is in how the representation of slaves by proslavery evangelical Christians as incapable of …