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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
“Did Emmett Till Die In Vain? Organized Labor Says No!”: The United Packinghouse Workers And Civil Rights Unionism In The Mid-1950s, Matthew Nichter
“Did Emmett Till Die In Vain? Organized Labor Says No!”: The United Packinghouse Workers And Civil Rights Unionism In The Mid-1950s, Matthew Nichter
Faculty Publications
Emmett Till’s mangled face is seared into our collective memory, a tragic epitome of the brutal violence that upheld white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. But Till's murder was more than just a tragedy: it also inspired an outpouring of determined protest, in which labor unions played a prominent role. The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) campaigned energetically on behalf of Emmett Till, from the stockyards of Chicago to the sugar refineries of Louisiana. Packinghouse workers petitioned, marched, and rallied to demand justice; the UPWA organized the first mass meeting addressed by Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley; and an …
"Protest Literature" Or Race As A Social Construction: An Analysis Of Baldwin's Blues For Mister Charlie, Sonia Potter
"Protest Literature" Or Race As A Social Construction: An Analysis Of Baldwin's Blues For Mister Charlie, Sonia Potter
Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects
This article discusses James Baldwin's 1964 play Blues for Mister Charlie as it functions as a form of protest literature that aims to portray race as a social construction. It contextualizes itself with background on the 1955 murder of Emmett Till as it applies to the plot of the play, and it explores subjects of miscegenation, interracial mixing, and the role of the press in evoking societal change during the Civil Rights Movement.
An Intersectional Feminist Perspective Of Emmett Till In Young Adult Literature, Claire Jones
An Intersectional Feminist Perspective Of Emmett Till In Young Adult Literature, Claire Jones
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Emmett Till’s murder inspired many novelists, poets, and artists. Recently, Till has inspired several feminist young adult novelists who are introducing his case in an intersectional way to a new generation of readers. The works that I have studied are A Wreath for Emmett Till (2003) by Marilyn Nelson, The Hunger Games Trilogy (2008-2010) by Suzanne Collins, and Midnight without a Moon (2017) by Linda Jackson. By examining how the authors employ a feminist perspective, readers can understand how they are striving for a more inclusive, intersectional feminist movement. This is significant because the publishing industry, specifically for Young Adult …
The Emmett Till Generation: The Birmingham Children's Crusade And The Renewed Civil Rights Movement, Rebecca Sherman
The Emmett Till Generation: The Birmingham Children's Crusade And The Renewed Civil Rights Movement, Rebecca Sherman
Pell Scholars and Senior Theses
In 1954, two white men murdered an African American boy named Emmett Till; his death sparked a generation of children to take part in the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s. One particular event in Birmingham, Alabama sparked nationwide sympathy for the movement. This event, called the Children's Crusade, highlighted the civil rights struggle in Birmingham by publishing images of children violently attacked by the police in newspapers and on television across the country. This media frenzy garnered sympathy from all Americans and ultimately led to the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, landmark civil rights legislation.
Negotiating The Delta: Dr. T.R.M. Howard In Mound Bayou, Mississippi, William Jackson Southerland
Negotiating The Delta: Dr. T.R.M. Howard In Mound Bayou, Mississippi, William Jackson Southerland
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
This paper examines the racially segregationist practices and the integrationist, inclusionist formation of African American leader Dr. T.R.M. Howard during his tenure as a surgeon and entrepreneur in the all-black Mississippi Delta community of Mound Bayou, 1942-1956. The paper analytically investigates the careful racial negotiations that were required of Howard as he advanced a separatist but egalitarian economic and social plan for Delta blacks. This separatist plan, it is argued, is grounded in the racial pragmatism of the Seventh-day Adventist church which provided a bibliocentric, Tuskegee-inspired education to Howard from youth through medical school and beyond. Howard’s adherence to Adventist …
Introduction: Lynching, Incarceration’S Cousin: From Till To Trayvon, Barbara Lewis
Introduction: Lynching, Incarceration’S Cousin: From Till To Trayvon, Barbara Lewis
Trotter Review
The wholesale criminalizing of the black male has been much in the news, put there by the Trayvon Martin case and the Florida verdict. (Incidentally, even though we don’t often think of it, Florida was where the first African slaves were installed in America, back in the 1500s in the city of St. Augustine.) As an academic, which, loosely translated means that I often bury my head between the covers of a book trying to figure out one thing or another, I am thought of as someone who is cautious and circumspect in what I think and write, but I …
Mamie Bradley's Unbearable Burden: Sexual And Aesthetic Politics In Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Koritha Mitchell
Mamie Bradley's Unbearable Burden: Sexual And Aesthetic Politics In Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Koritha Mitchell
Koritha Mitchell
This essay offers a reading of Bebe Moore Campbell's 1992 novel Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, which re-imagines the 1955 murder of Emmett Till and its aftermath. I argue that the novel is a tribute to Till and his mother, Mamie Bradley, but that it also illustrates the agony of being the survivor whose pain occasions such tributes. Through Delotha Todd, the character loosely based on Bradley, Campbell imagines the mother's burden to have been especially unbearable because so many strangers, including Campbell herself, claimed to share it. In the process of acknowledging the many facets Delotha's pain, Campbell …
Childhood Trauma And Its Reverberations In Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Suzanne W. Jones
Childhood Trauma And Its Reverberations In Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Suzanne W. Jones
English Faculty Publications
Novelist Bebe Moore Campbell was only five when Emmett Till was murdered on August 28, 1955. But in Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992) she seeks to answer the question that black teenagers in Mississippi, and indeed many people from all over the United States, asked after seeing the photograph of Till's mutilated and bloated body: "How could they do that to him? He's only a boy" (Dittmer 58). Campbell embraces the view that Lillian Smith expressed in Killers of the Dream (1949): "The warped, distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white …
Blakeney, James, Bronx African American History Project
Blakeney, James, Bronx African American History Project
Oral Histories
James Blakeney is a long time Bronx resident who grew up in the Patterson Housing Projects. His parents were sharecroppers from North and South Carolina. Neither of his parents received an education beyond the 6th or 8th grade. His father fought in World War II and then returned to the states to live in Queens, where James lived for three years, before moving to the Patterson Houses. His father worked at the mess hall of St. Albans Neighborhood Hospital and left the family, as many fathers were beginning to do, when James was ten years old. Mrs. Blakeney …