African American Studies Commons^™

Music Icons Commemorative Stamps: Marvin Gaye, United States Postal Service

Rodney Lawrence Hurst, Sr. Stamp Collection

Marvin Gaye commemorative stamps, Music Icon series. Date: 2018

Neutral Ground Or Battleground? Hidden History, Tourism, And Spatial (In)Justice In The New Orleans French Quarter, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

In 2017, the city of New Orleans removed four monuments that paid homage to the city’s Confederate past. The removal came after contentious public debate and decades of intermittent grassroots protests. Despite the public process, details about the removal were closely guarded in the wake of death threats, vandalism, lawsuits, and organized resistance by monument supporters. Workers hired to dismantle the monuments did so surreptitiously under the cloak of darkness, protected by a heavy police presence, with their faces covered to conceal their identities. The divisiveness of this debate and the removal lay bare the contestation over public space, historical …

The Rape Of Recy Taylor [Film Review], Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Nancy Buirksi’s documentary The Rape of Recy Taylor centers on a brutal sexual assault in Abbeville, Alabama in 1944. A 24-year-old African American wife and mother, coming home from a sanctified church service with a friend and her son, was forced into a car at gunpoint, and gang raped by six young white men. The beating heart of the film is the on-screen testimony of Taylor’s younger brother, Robert Corbitt, and her younger sister, Alma Daniels, who convey the unspeakably cruel and vicious character of the attack: Corbitt repeats the perpetrators’ directions to Recy: “They said they wanted her to …

The Making Of A Raisin In The Sun, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun premiered on the Broadway stage in January 1959 just as the edifice of national segregation was cracking open. Response to the momentous 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Bd. of Education included both the important early challenges to long-accepted practices of white supremacy and the intensified mobilization of widespread white defiance to the ruling. Black Bus boycotters in Montgomery, Alabama, and their young minister leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Black high school students attempting to attend Little Rock’s Central High and their families faced organized harassment and dangerous forms …

Gettysburg College Journal Of The Civil War Era 2018

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

No abstract provided.

2018 Gjmpp Monograph Series: Grace Jordan Mcfadden Professors Program, John Mcfadden, Michael J. Walsh, Lauren A. Reid, Marsha Dowda, Melinda Forthofer, Daheia Barr-Anderson, Ruth Saunders, Russell Pate, Candace A. Bethea, Jonathan C. Rann, Anthony T. Carr, Victor D. Kidd

Monograph Series

The Grace Jordan McFadden Professors Program (GJMPP), formerly the African American Professors Program (AAPP)/Carolina Diversity Professors Program (CDPP) at the University of South Carolina, is honored to publish its seventeenth edition of this annual monograph series. GJMPP recognizes the significance of offering its scholars a venue through which they have the opportunity to engage in research and to publish their refereed papers that continually contribute to their respective academic areas. Parallel with the publication of their manuscripts is a venue to gain visibility among colleagues throughout postsecondary institutions at national and international levels.

Scholars who have contributed papers for this …

Meeting At The Threshold: Slavery’S Influence On Hospitality And Black Personhood In Late-Antebellum American Literature, Rebecca Wiltberger Wiggins

Theses and Dissertations--English

In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to …

"A Beacon Of Hope": The African American Baptist Church And The Origins Of Black Higher Learning Institutions In Kentucky, Erin Wiggins Gilliam

Theses and Dissertations--History

This dissertation focuses on the African American Baptist church as a vital architect of black higher education in Kentucky. In keeping with the historiography of black education, my research focuses on the often-forgotten component of religion and its impact on the development of post-secondary education. More specifically, my work explores the dynamics of race, class and gender in shaping the origins of black higher learning institutions in the state. I contend that Kentucky was home to a growing and progressive African American middle class who sought racial uplift to solve the “negro problem" through education. I also reveal that African …

What Works? Teaching African American Students In Urban Schools, Shawn Renee Forman

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The academic achievement gap for African American students compared to their White counterparts has historically and currently remained significant. Many researchers have been prompted to address this issue by examining the practices utilized to teach African American students. The findings from this study suggest that when teachers move away from the traditional methods of teaching and move toward teaching practices that take into consideration the individual student, motivation and academic performance can be achieved. This research presents a general literature review, interviews from four urban elementary school principals, and the stories of five African American urban elementary teachers who were …

Hip Hop Hermeneutics: How The Culture Influences Preachers, Dwight A. Radcliff Jr.

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

"Hip Hop Hermeneutics" essay lays out findings of current research into how Hip Hop culture has been formational for African American preachers, and how that culture informs their preaching. There is a generation of preachers leading congregations today that have grown up with Hip Hop. Hip Hop culture has left an indelible mark upon them; just as the church has. How does the cultural influence of Hip Hop affect their preaching? Hip Hop hermeneutics is the response put forth by this article. This article traces the practice and theology of early African American preachers, the work of James Cone in …

From Yeezus To Pablo: An Existential Theology Between God, Blackness, And Being, Shea Watts

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

Kanye West has transformed and transfigured from a young rapper representing the Southside of Chicago, to an icon, a rap genius, a god. His persona has continually evolved from his arrival on the Hip Hop scene, leading to his emergence as, "Yeezus." This essay argues for an investigation of Kanye’s theological claims through the lens of his own body, particularly the balance between how he conveys what it is like to be a black man in an American culture plagued by racism and the potential of the black body to assert its incarnate godlikeness in his music. In addition, this …

The Messianic Zeal: A Case Of Radical Aesthetics In Black Cultural Production, Daniel L. Williams

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

This essay examines artwork by popular artists D’Angelo, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar and 2pac Shakur and compares their articulations to a larger discourse of messianic symbolism in (black) American popular culture. In this paper, messianic symbolism is a discursive chain of symbols that invoke the Black experience. Artists extend the legacy of earlier representations of black messianism by similarly representing themselves as Jews, saviors or folk heroes with a specific mission to save a world burdened by racial strife and oppression. These qualities manifest in lyrics, album covers, and other late 20th century rhetoric.

Contributors

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

List of contributors.

Facilitating Factors And Positive Reasons African American Men Attend Psychotherapy, Taia Willis

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Researchers have found that African American men are one of the most marginalized, targeted, and disenfranchised groups of people. In the past, African American men were less likely to attend psychotherapy compared to other ethnicities. Barriers to treatment includes the following: distrust in the mental health system, self-reliant behaviors, religious ideologies, cultural stigmas, and the ideology of what it means to be a man and an African American man in America. This study addressed the lack of qualitative studies on the experiences of African American men who attend psychotherapy by exploring the lived experiences of 10 African American men who …

Geografía Abolicionista Y El Problema De La Inocencia, Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Publications and Research

Resumen:

En el presente artículo se analizan las geografías carcelarias en los Estados Unidos, desde el despliegue del capitalismo racial. La geógrafa afroamericana parte de la tesis de que las prisiones contemporáneas son extractivas, es decir, extraen personas y, cuando, en el mejor de los casos, no hacen parte de los altos índices de las muertes prematuras, las expulsan al mundo sin el derecho a ser ellas, dinámica que estimula la circulación rápida de flujos de dinero. Frente a esta topografía anuladora de la vida, la también activista afroamericana reflexiona sobre su experiencia en contra del complejo militar carcelario, el …

“Jailed On The Charge Of Sodomy”: A Same-Sex, Interracial Marriage In 1888, Adam Yeich

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Adam Yeich explains and presents an Ohio newspaper report of a same-sex, interracial marriage in 1888 in Arkansas. This article includes the full text of the newspaper report, an introduction explaining its significance, and a bibliography.

Douglass’ Reply To A. C. C. Thompson’S ‘Letter From Frederick Douglass,’ As Reprinted In The Anti-Slavery Bugle: A Critical Edition Of Both Letters, With A Summary Of Maryland’S Fugitive Slave Laws, Kayla Hardy-Butler

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Kayla Hardy-Butler presents a famous letter by Frederick Douglass, as it was published in Ohio, with the letter that prompted it. This edition also includes a summary of Maryland slave statutes from the time to better explain the day-to-day experience of slavery debated in this correspondence.

Table Of Contents

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

No abstract provided.

Introduction: "Ain’T It Evil To Live Backwards?": A Hip Hop Perspective Of Religion, Travis T. Harris, Cassandra D. Chaney

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

Historically, Black religion has been the cornerstone of the African experience in America. Due to the "peculiar institution” of slavery" and the ways this institutional residue still affect the lives of slave descendants, Hip Hop provides a forum to simultaneously acknowledge similarities and highlight differences. What scholars of religion and Hip Hop studies have revealed are the ways in which the effectiveness and our very understanding of “religion” changes when we bring Hip Hop in to the mix.

Foreword, Cassandra D. Chaney

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

Foreword.