African American Studies Commons^™

Ua12/2/1 View Of The Hill, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

Special student guide edition of the College Heights Herald.

• Ransdell, Gary. Welcome Class of 2019!
• Belknap, Abby. Welcome & Traditions – Fight Song, Red Towel, Alma Mater, Big Red, Mascots
• MASTER Plan – Making Academic & Social Transitions Educationally Rewarding
• Dorm Life: A Guide to the Perfect Room for You – Housing & Residence Life
• Making the Most of Your Dorm
• Academics – Curriculum
• Academic Resources
• What About Advising & Class Registration?
• Study Abroad
• Campus Life
• What Can Your Student ID Do For You?
• Student Services
• Under the Big Top – Homecoming
• Parent & Family Weekend
• Staying Healthy
• Clubs & …

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 Multi-Institutional Analysis Of Greek Affiliation And Academic/ Involvement Outcomes For African American College Students, Donald Mitchell Jr., Ph.D., John A. Gipson

Executives, Administrators, & Staff Publications

The academic and social outcomes of college fraternities and sororities remain unclear. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the characteristics and experiences of African American college students (AACSs) attending seven institutions across the United States, using Greek affiliation as the primary measure of comparison. Quantitative data were used to explore how Greek affiliation influences various academic and social involvement outcomes for AACSs. Findings suggest that involvement in fraternities and sororities is not associated with grade point average, among other academic outcomes. Findings also suggest that involvement with fraternities and sororities was associated with involvement in student organizations …

"It Didn't Seem Like Race Mattered": Exploring The Implications Of Service-Learning Pedagogy For Reproducing Or Challenging Color-Blind Racism, Sarah Anna Becker, Crystal Paul

Faculty Publications

Prior research measuring service-learning program successes reveals the approach can positively affect students' attitudes toward community service, can increase students' motivation to learn and ability to internalize class material, and can change their view of social issues. Studies also suggest that college students sometimes enter and leave a field site in ways that contribute to the reproduction of inequality. In this paper, we draw on three years of data from a service-learning project that involves sending college-age students (most of whom are white and materially privileged) into local, predominantly black, high-poverty neighborhoods to participate in …

Prostate Cancer Education In The African American Community: Implcations For Community-Based Health Communication Strategies, Barry Charles Hill

Open Access Theses

This paper examines the social milieu of African American barbershops by exploring health discussions and information transfer between barbers and barbershop clients. This paper examines associations between peer helper and health promotion intervention variables, and peer helper intervention effectiveness in increasing knowledge and health discussion frequency. Study findings suggest barbers with higher education are significantly more effective as peer helpers in discussing health topics more frequently (OR 4.64; CI 1.00 - 21.49) and in increasing client knowledge (β 0.94; CI 0.26 - 1.63). Additionally, barbershop health educational materials were significantly associated with increased barber health discussion (OR 4.13; CI 1.32 …

Understanding The Experiences Of African-American Relatives Who Serve As Care Providers To Custodial Children In Arkansas: An Intersectional Case Study, Carmen Johnson-Hardin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

An increase in the provision of long-term care by relative caregivers to custodial children has brought attention to the physical, emotional, and Social challenges of this complex caregiving experience. Prior studies have examined separate structural identities that focus on comparing the quality of life, educational status, Social status, and income of grandparent custodial caregivers. To extend this research, it is important to explore the gaps in service provisions to relative caregivers; comparative viewpoints of relative caregivers and service providers regarding policies and practices; and heterogeneity among Black relative caregivers utilizing an intersectional framework. Face-to-face or telephone interviews were conducted with …

The Spectacle Of Orphanhood: Reimagining Orphans In Postbellum Fiction, Afrin Zeenat

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Orphan iconography has always been deployed in American literature and culture, but nineteenth-century American literature, fiction in particular, abounds in orphans, both real and imaginary. The orphan’s amphibious nature is hailed and demonized as the epitome of individualism and unbridled freedom, and also as the location of society’s anxiety. This complicated and conflicted construction of orphans animates the Social and cultural realm in postbellum America, foregrounding issues of class, race, and gender.

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 …

Origins Of An Unmarked Georgia Cemetery Using Ancient Dna Analysis, Andrew T. Ozga, Raúl Y. Tito, Brian M. Kemp, Hugh Matternes, Alexandra Obregon-Tito, Leslie Neal, Cecil M. Lewis, Jr.

Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints

Determining the origins of those buried within undocumented cemeteries is of incredible importance to historical archaeologists and in many cases, the nearby communities. In the case of Avondale Burial Place, a cemetery in Bibb County, Georgia, in use from 1820 to 1950, all written documentation of those interred within it has been lost. Osteological and archaeological evidence alone could not describe, with confidence, the ancestral origins of the 101 individuals buried there. In the present study, we utilize ancient DNA extraction methods to investigate the origins of Avondale Burial Place through the use of well-preserved skeletal fragments from 20 individuals …

Errant Memory In African American Literature Of The Long Nineteenth Century, Tristan Alexander Striker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I trace the complex black literary trope of errant memory through American and African American literature. Authors of African descent are constantly subjected to what I call Africanity, or the paratextual historicizing elements provided by white interlocutors that seek to impose specific caricatures and stereotypes on them and their works to force them into the American historical narrative that depends on their dehumanized and commodified status. These caricatures and stereotypes are rooted in an Africa imagined by these white interlocutors, one that does not match any reality. Authors of African descent transcend this paratextual Africanity through what …

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" …

Performing (Non)Profit, Race, And American Identity In The Nation's Capital: Arena Stage, 1950-2010, Donatella Galella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Theatre socially reproduces and contests economic, racial, and national hierarchies. There is a dearth of scholarship on U.S. regional theatre because of middlebrow anxiety and yet, for that very reason, regional theatre demands attention as a fitting example of the site of struggle over different forms of capital. Located in Washington, D.C., Arena Stage is the ideal case study for both the invention of viable non-profit theatre and the negotiation of race and national identity in the United States. Arguably the closest institution the U.S. has to a national theatre, the company was the first regional theatre to send a …

What Condoms Can't Cover: Do Structural Factors Predispose Black, African American, And Latina/O Adults In Harlem And The South Bronx To Engaging In Hiv Sex Risk Behaviors?, Fabienne Snowden

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

More than thirty years into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Black, African American, and Latina/o communities continue to demonstrate the highest rates of HIV/AIDS in the US, accounting for 64% of all new infections and 58% of all AIDS diagnoses in 2009. Despite the longevity of this public health crisis, individually-based behavioral change approaches to HIV/AIDS prevention continue to be the most widely used and funded methods of combating HIV risk in Black, African American and Latina/o communities. These methods have been proven to lower the risk of HIV transmission, but HIV incidence in the US remains high at approximately 50, 000 …

Privilege In Haiti: Travails In Color Of The First Bourgeois Nation-State In The Americas, Philippe-Richard Marius

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Who are the elites in the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere? Do Haiti's elites constitute themselves in a Blackness vs. Whiteness/Mulattoness opposition? Through the investigation of these questions, the central thesis of this ethnography emerges as the material unity in privilege of Haiti's colorist fragments. Noirisme, a fundamentalist strain of Haitian black nationalism that reached hegemony in the dictatorship of François Duvalier in the 1960s, is in marked retreat in contemporary Haiti. Its lingering influence nonetheless continues to foster a black qua black sociality among privileged black nationalists. Mulatto nationalism as political project and public discourse lapsed into …

33rd Annual African American Commencement, 2015, San Jose State University, Associated Students

African American Commencement

33rd Annual African American Commencement

"Black Grad: Striving Today to Create a Better Tomorrow." The 2015 African American Commencement ceremony was held on Friday, May 22, 2015 in the Student Union Ballroom at San Jose State University.

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

LSU 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 …

"I'M Rich Bitch:" Black Class Performance And The New Nouveau Riche, Nykia Hannah

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

With its multitude of sub-genres, larger than life personalities, and fifteen minutes of fame offerings, reality television has quickly changed the face and economics of television culture. This research examines the disruption of traditional roles of race and class in reality television. Interdisciplinary in content and methodology, this study uses Real Housewives of Atlanta to identify the ways in which various representations of blackness challenge hegemonic understandings of what it means to be black in the United States. Focusing on the fluidity of identity, "I'm Rich Bitch" highlights the role that popular culture plays in redetermining populist perceptions of blackness.

Ua12/2/1 Graduation Guide, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

Special graduation edition of the College Heights Herald:

• Ransdell, Gary. Letter to Class of 2015
• Taylor, Nicki. Letter to Class of 2015 – Student Government Association
• Rogers, Shelby. College Heights Herald News Editor
• Havel, Catherine. Spirit Masters
• Patel, Dharmesh. International Student Diplomat
• Beal, Josh. Talisman

Ua12/2/1 Stress Busters, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

Special finals week addition of the College Heights Herald.