Black History Commons^™

“This, To Me, Was My Town”: How Segregation Shaped Huntington, West Virginia’S Black Community, Jillian Alexis Kendall

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Using Huntington, West Virginia as a case study to examine Black urban-Appalachian communities, this thesis analyzes Huntington’s Black “city within a city” from 1934–1961, exploring how city-sanctioned segregationist practices shaped the community. In 1929, The Herald Dispatch asserted that Black Huntingtonians were able to thrive due to racial harmony facilitated by the “tolerant” attitudes of white Huntingtonians. However, closer inspection reveals that the city’s Black population survived in spite of persistent racial intolerance from white citizens, as well as city, state, and federal authorities. Though Huntington was not technically segregated by de jure means, it is apparent that the city …

“We Only Care For White Germs”: How Black Chicagoans Used Community Care To Overcome Medical Discrimination, Kylie Power

Research Honors

This project examines the use of Community Care as a means of healthcare within Black American populations, specifically in Chicago. Background information is provided on the evolution of Community Care, from slavery, to post-emancipation, to the early 20th century. Provident Hospital of Chicago in particular is examined during the early 20th century section, with a look at how the 1918 Spanish Influenza affected the Hospital, it's patrons, and Chicago. Important pieces of literature from the time period are combined with newspaper articles and other reports, as well as secondary literature, to construct this social history.

Tuberculosis In Jim Crow Virginia, 1900-1972, Elizabeth Dooley

Theses and Dissertations

Tuberculosis (TB) was a major public health concern in the United States, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. Transmission and treatment of the disease, which is spread between humans through close contact, was complicated by racial segregation laws in the South known as Jim Crow laws. Virginia subscribed to these laws, which played a role in how and where Black Virginians with TB could be treated. Segregated treatment facilities with an inadequate number of beds for the number of infected people and deaths in the state added to these complications of disease control and plan for eradication. …

Digital Griots Playing Lottery Tickets: A Study Of Hip Hop And Social Transformation In Ghana's #Fixthecountry Movement, Jaime M. Kowlessar

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

On June 28, 2021, activist Ibrahim Mohammed (Macho Kaaka) was murdered in Ejura, Ghana, after using social media to criticize government failures. When protesters demanding justice were shot by security forces, politically engaged Ghanaian hip hop artists refused silence, contributing to Ghana’s #FixTheCountry movement—the nation’s largest youth mobilization in a generation. Yet scholarly debates about how hip hop contributes to social change remain unresolved, divided between those celebrating its activist potential and those critiquing its limitations. This dissertation introduces the lottery ticket theory as an alternative framework for understanding cultural activism’s relationship to political transformation. Rather than asking whether hip …

White Fear/Black Apprehension, Volume 2: An Analysis Of The Racialized Targeting Of African Americans In The Educational System, In The Southern U.S. States, Circa 1865–1965, Christopher Donell Gipson

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

For African Americans, the legacy of racial oppression extends across centuries, from the transatlantic slave trade and enslavement to the persistence of institutionalized racism, White supremacy, racial violence, and structural inequality within the United States. These racialized systems are reproduced intergenerationally through social institutions, education, media, political discourse, historical narratives, and cultural representations that repeatedly normalize negative constructions of Africans and African Americans. Such representations operate on conscious and subconscious levels, shaping social attitudes, institutional practices, and perceptions of racial difference. As argued in White Fear / Black Apprehension: An Analysis of White European American Racism and Mob Violence Through …

Studio Museum Harlem Excursion: A Study Of How Resources Are Utilized For Expressing A Message, Sarah Neiman

Occasional Essays

Museums have a unique ability to situate themselves in the present moment while also commemorating the past and imagining the future. Studio Museum Harlem (SMH) does this, especially on the day of its reopening. The museum originally opened in 1968, amongst many Civil Rights and Black Power demonstrations occurring across the country. This innovative spirit is still visible today despite the museum closing and reopening again. The museum made its grand reopening on November 15th, 2025, after seven years of having its doors closed for construction. The Bronx African American History Project team had the special opportunity to visit SMH …

Gambian, Muslim, American: A Bronx Woman, Olatoni Akinbamowo

Occasional Essays

Kujegi Camara is Gambian, Muslim, and American. She was raised in the Bronx, in neighborhoods, madrasas (Arabic, school for Islamic education) and masjids (Arabic, mosque) rooted deeply in Senegambian (a region encompassing Senegal, Gambia, and neighboring countries) culture and community. Kujegi was raised by a stay-at-home mother and a father who worked in construction. The oldest of nine children, she spent her childhood taking care of her siblings and doing housework, but her parents always emphasized and prioritized her education. Her adolescence and early adulthood were marred, but not tainted, by experiences of Islamophobia in school. After 9/11, fear and …

Building A New Dream: Mohammed Mardah And The Making Of West African Community In The Bronx, Hatoumata Tunkara

Occasional Essays

The life of Mohammed Mardah, as demonstrated through his interview, is more than just a personal immigration story. Instead, it is seen as a view into the lived realities of West African migrants in the late twentieth century. His path from a young man looking for opportunity to becoming a community leader symbolizes how African immigrants in the 1980s and ‘90s influenced the Bronx not only by surviving hardship, but also by building networks and institutions that reshaped the cultural and social life of the borough. Mardah’s story enunciates that immigration is not a straight path toward individual success; it …

The Collapse Of The Cotton States League: Segregation And The Final Years Of Minor League Baseball In South Arkansas, Alex Mason Becker Mceachern

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From 1953 through 1955 the Cotton States League of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana went through an integration and financial crisis that led to its collapse. Through this three season stretch several clubs attempted to sign and play black ballplayers, a first in the segregated minor league. While the major leagues and a majority of minor leagues successfully integrated, the Cotton States League represented one of the final holdouts of whites-only baseball. The league collapsed in 1955 due to a myriad of issues including declining interest, which led to severe financial issues. This thesis will examine the final three years of …

A Voice To Remember: Recovering The Rhetoric Of Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, Diana Lynne Nogay

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation will recover Mordecai Johnson's rhetoric to demonstrate how he addressed the political issues of his time, which were often related to race, and were frequently reduced or even forgotten. In this dissertation, titled “A Voice to Remember: Recovering the Rhetoric of Mordecai Wyatt Johnson,” I perform and analyze the rhetoric associated with him. Johnson was well known for being the president of Howard University; the goal of this project is to recover the rhetoric and identify the common themes. The two themes identified in Johnson’s rhetoric are religion and education. Personal traits and associations with religion are traced …

Abolitionism And The Struggle Against Slavery In Livingston County, Justin Behrend Ph.D.

History

This article examines the abolitionist movement in Livingston County, New York, through the records of the Livingston County Anti-Slavery Society. It shows how this region in Western New York transformed from one where slavery was tolerated to one where people fought against slavery during the Civil War. Activists between 1837 and 1839 organized meetings to spread abolitionism and to push the United States to abolish slavery.

Harlem’S Avenues For Agency: An Exploration Of Black Female Agency In Angelina Weld Grimké And Zora Neale Hurston’S Short Stories, Jessica Ellen Hartenbower

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores themes of Black female agency in selected short stories by Angelina Weld Grimké and Zora Neale Hurston. Pushing back against the belief that the Harlem Renaissaince was a movement solely for male artists, Grimké and Hurston write short stories that center Black women and their experiences. Through the avenues of bodily autonomy, the using or silencing of voice, the opportunity and ability to make choices, issues of justice, retribution, and vengeance, the holding of authority, and being empowered or disempowered, I examine the female characters’ exercising of their agency to varying degrees. I also discuss how religious …

Oral History Interview With Fairolyn Livingston, Fairolyn Livingston, Wenxian Zhang

Oral Histories

Fairolyn H. Livingston ’83 is known as the “institutional memory of Winter Park’s west side,” where she was born and raised by what she lovingly refers to as a village. She earned her bachelor’s degree in humanities from Rollins’ Hamilton Holt School, is a retired human service specialist with the State of Florida, and has been associated with the Heritage Center since it opened in 2007, becoming its chief historian in 2014. In 1997, Livingston received the Rhea Marsh and Dorothy Lockhart Smith Research Grant—awarded annually by Rollins’ Olin Library in partnership with the Winter Park Public Library—to support research …

“A Wonderful World?”: C&S’S Georgia Plan, Urban Renewal, And Historic Preservation In Savannah, Augusta, And Macon, J. Mark Souther

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Iii.F.2 Safety And Security, Kimberly Rostan, Bria Harper, Jim Neighbors

Crafting Democratic Futures

The document details the persistent and systemic violence against Black people in Spartanburg County from the end of the Civil War through the Civil Rights era, highlighting the role of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Red Shirts in enforcing white supremacy through terror, intimidation, and murder. It emphasizes that this continuous threat of violence created lasting psychological trauma and served as a major barrier to economic and social progress for Black communities.

Do You Remember Me?: America's Racist Past And The Construction Of "Blackness", Shae South

SPARK Symposium Presentations

The United States has a dark and complicated relationship with the idea of race and what it means to belong to a specific group of people dating back to before the first enslaved African stepped foot onto its shores. The lynching case of Dan Davis showcases this precarious past, as the accounts of his brutal murder convey a level of excitement that was not unusual in these situations, yet he was quickly forgotten about and cast aside like many others who suffered a fate similar to his. This forgetting, the casting aside of traumas, has defined the Black experience since …

El Doble Discurso Del Simbolismo De La (Pureza De) Sangre En El Diario Espiritual De La Donada Afroperuana Úrsula De Jesús, Yertty M. Vandermolen

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

Purity of Blood Symbolism and Double Discourse in The Spiritual Diary of the Afro-Peruvian Donada Úrsula de Jesús

Through a close reading of The Spiritual Diary, this study examines how the Afro-Peruvian donada Úrsula de Jesús—whose experiences and visions were recorded and transcribed by a group of literate nuns in her convent—employs discursive strategies to dismantle the discourse of blood purity and reformulate the meaning of the blood. Drawing on the Christian belief that all humans are created equally in the image of God and redeemed through the blood of Christ as promised for universal salvation, Úrsula constructs an egalitarian …

Collective Memory For The African Motherland In Interwar Black Chicago And The Limits Of The Environmental Justice Model, Colin Fisher

History: Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Student Perspectives On Increasing Visibility Of Las Vegas African American History, Ericka Marielle Garces, Nicole Garcia-Contreras, Alfredo Lim

Communication Studies Student Research

Photographer Clinton Wright documented the everyday lives and experiences of the African American community in Las Vegas' Historic Westside from 1964 to 1971. He later donated his collection of photographic negatives to the Special Collections and Archives at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries. Although the collection is open to the public, physical access is limited to the Special Collections Reading Room, which may restrict usability for some researchers and community members. This project highlights the importance of digitization and metadata workflows in improving access to and visibility of archival materials.

In this poster, the authors present their work …

Bear Bryant, Sam Cunningham, And Popular Memory Of The Civil Rights Movement, Kurt E. Kemper

Research & Publications

Popular writers, sports journalists, documentarians, and fans of college football have built a legend surrounding the 1970 USC-Alabama game and its alleged significance in the process of desegregation, a legend that is deeply flawed and strongly resistant to scholarly correction.  The persistence of the legend, told from a white perspective for a white audience, does much to illustrate ongoing resistance to an interpretation of the Civil Rights Movement that places Black activists and direct action at the center of the story.