Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Martre, Patricia And Alfaro, Almilicar, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Patty Dukes, birth name Patricia Marte, is a woman of Dominican descent. Her parents left the Dominican Republic to move to Puerto Rico where she was born.

At five years old, she moved to the the United States, the Bronx specifically. Because her father was a member of the military, her family was given the opportunity to move to the US much more easily than other families. She lived with her parents, sister, and “brother” – who is actually her cousin, but was adopted by her family as a brother.

Rephstar, whose actual name is Almilcar Alfaro, is a man …

Diaz, Rebel, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Rebel Diaz

Rodrigo Venegas - "RodStarz" b. 19 November 1979; Churchsea, England

Gonzalo Venegas - "G1" b. 14 February 1985; Chicago, Illinois

Teresita Ayala - "Lah Tere" b. 24 September 1979; Chicago, Illinois

Rebel Diaz is a hip-hop group living and working out of the Bronx. The individuals making up Rebel Diaz come from politically active families in Chicago. The Venegas brothers are sons of Chilean "exiles." Their parents were student activists of El Movimento de Izquierda Revolucionaria. After the CIA military coup that placed Augusto Pinochet as head of state, their father was sent to jail and their mother …

Ua12/2/1 College Heights Herald, Vol. 83, No. 25, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Archives Records

WKU campus newspaper reporting campus, athletic and Bowling Green, Kentucky news.

Dismantling The Master's House : Deconstructing The Roots Of Antiblack Racism And The Construction Of The "Other" In Judaism, Christianity And Islam., John Chenault

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This critical inquiry into the social constructions of "black" and "white" identities analyzes the roles of the three "western" monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) in the cognitive and sociohistorical developments of racial slavery and antiblack racism. Specifically, it investigates the sociohistorical consequences of the inherent dualisms of the "western" monotheisms and how those dualisms are expressed in the production of social theories and systems that rely on believer/non-believer oppositions and binaries defined by a Manichaean view of the universe and a teleological conception of history that fosters and sustains an eternal holy war against infidels. What emerges from this analysis …

Rollins, Joseph Metz, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Reverend Joseph Metz Rollins, Jr. was born 8 September 1926 in Newport News, Virginia. He graduated high school in 1943. Although Reverend Rollins remembers that “even though I was in a segregated situation, I grew up being encouraged to participated and be involved…” (Pg. 5). During World War Two, Rev. Rollins entered the Jay C. Smith Seminary. He was ordained in 1950 as a Presbyterian minister, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather.

In 1953, In Tallahassee, Florida, Rev. Rollins helped with the organization of the Southern Presbyterian Church. He met Martin Luther King, Jr. After two girls …

Mcgee, Mildred Interview 2, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

This interview gives insights into Judge McGee's personality and beliefs. He was a judge for fifteen years and heavily involved in community politics. Leroi Archible describes him as “firm and stern, but fair.” He did not like lawyers who “tried to be cute.” Family was very important to him, and he supported his nephew, Roger Wareham, who was accused of “ planning to overthrow the government … (but he) was talking about: justice and fairness.” Guliani was the prosecutor but he lost the case. Judge McGee believed he was innocent and was willing to stake his house on that. There …

Robinson, Robert, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Robert Robinson (b. 8/11/1943) is a former public health specialist for the Center for Disease Control. The son of a bartender father from West Virginia and a mother from Massachusetts, Robinson was born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, on Stebbins Ave. During this time, the Stebbins Ave neighborhood was inhabited mostly by blacks and Puerto Ricans, and the two cultures remained relatively aloof from one another. Robinson recalls that there was some limited gang activity in the area: some local toughs from the surrounding areas would sometimes rough up the young people on Stebbins Ave, which did not …

Walker, William, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

William Walker, also known as Billy Bang, is a jazz violinist who grew up in the Bronx.

He was born in Plateau, Alabama, right across the tracks from Mobile. His mother had him when she was seventeen, and soon after moved into an apartment with her sisters in Harlem on Lenox Avenue between 111^th and 112^th Street. She cleaned the houses of Jewish families who lived on the Grand Concourse. His birth date is uncertain, although he places it at approximately 1947. His uncle served as a father figure.

Walker attended elementary school at P.S. 170. He attended …

Bowman, Willie Interview 2, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

The following is a transcript of the Bronx African American History Project’s second interview with Mrs. Willie E.P. Bowman. Although she covers some of the same subjects in this interview with Dr. Purnell that she did in her first interview, she also delves more deeply into her work with the community as opposed to her career in social and correction work.

Born on November 30, 1931 in Montgomery, Alabama, Mrs. Willie Ella Paschal Bowman spent just the first two years of her life in what she proudly described as the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1933, she and …

Bowman, Willie Interview 1, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

INTERVIEWERS: Brian Purnell

INTERVIEWEE: Mrs. Willie E.P. Bowman (Interview One)

SUMMARY BY: Andrew O’Connell

Born on November 30, 1931 in Montgomery, Alabama, Mrs. Willie Ella Paschal Bowman spent just the first two years of her life in what she proudly described as the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1933, she and her mother headed north to stay with Bowman’s great aunt in Harlem, part of the first wave of the Great Migration that would soon develop as one of the most significant movements of peoples that this country has ever seen. After earning three dollars a week as …

American Commemorative Panels: Kwanzaa, United States Postal Service. Stamp Division

Rodney Lawrence Hurst, Sr. Stamp Collection

Informational pages for Kwanzaa Commemorative Stamp – American Commemorative Panels, includes images of the stamps, information about the stamp and information about Kwanzaa. First issued October 26, 2007.

Rodriguez, Felix, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Felix Rodriguez (b. 7/9/1967) is a New York-born filmmaker. Both his parents are Puerto Rican. Rodriguez was born in East Harlem and was raised for the first 10 years of his life in Queens. At this time, his parents moved back to Puerto Rico, where Felix attended junior high and high school. Because his first language was English, Rodriguez had to pick up Spanish in Puerto Rico. His primary occupation in Puerto Rico was as an attendant for his father’s livestock, a job that he hated. Puerto Rico was constantly being inundated with American popular culture, and soon enough Felix …

Mcgee, Mildred Interview 1, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Mrs. Mildred McGee was born June 29, 1927 and married to Judge Hansel McGee. Also interviewed here are her daughter Dr. Elizabeth McGee and Mr. Leroi Archible. In the first session, Mrs. McGee provides details of her education, her parents’ backgrounds, living in Harlem, the Bronx, Washington DC and moving back to the Bronx. She also describes her husband’s childhood and his education. She attended an elementary school where there were no African-American teachers and she had only one African-American teacher in Junior High who taught Social Studies. The students also learned how to sew, cook and housekeeping at school. …

De La Luz, Caridad, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Interviewee: Caridad de la Luz, a.k.a. La Bruja

Interviewer: Oneka LaBennet

Date of Interview: October 23, 2007

Summarized by Alice Stryker

La Luz’s parents came from Puerto Rico and lived in New York city, where they met. She was born in the Bronx in 1973 and has lived in the Bronx her entire life. She spent most of her childhood living on Leland Avenue, which was racially mixed. Her father was a mechanic for Volkswagen and her mother was a teacher at Murry Bertgraum High School. She went to P.S. 100 for grade school and P.S. 71 for Junior High …

The Association Of Racial Attitudes And Spiritual Beliefs In Post-Apartheid South Africa, Timothy B. Smith, Christopher R. Stones, Christopher E. Peck, Anthony V. Naidoo

Faculty Publications

Previous research has investigated the complex association between religious beliefs and racism. Many studies have found that fundamentalist religious beliefs are positively associated with racial prejudice among European and European American populations. However, few studies have examined whether this association is found in other cultures or whether the association also characterizes spiritual beliefs. Data from 493 South African university students from three racial backgrounds revealed significant differences among the groups. A positive association between fundamentalism and racial prejudice was found among participants, but general spiritual beliefs were negatively associated with racist attitudes. The results emphasize the need to address contextual …

Book Information And Talk At Ritz Theatre And Lavilla Museum

Textual material from the Rodney Lawrence Hurst, Sr. Papers

A talk with Rodney Hurst about his new book "It was Never about a Hot dog and a Coke"

Sixty-First U.S. Colored Infantry (Sc 1515), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1515. Partial account book (pp. 13-20, 170-184, 187-262) containing General Orders and Special Orders for the 61st U.S. Colored Infantry and the 2nd West Tennessee Infantry of African Descent. Also includes a letter written by Nellie Evans (Nov. 1865) to her cousin Jeff.

Dacosta, Linval, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

INTERVIEWER: Mark Naison, Natasha Lightfoot

INTERVIEWEE: Linval DaCosta

SUMMARY BY: Patrick O’Donnell

Linval DaCosta is a supervisor in the New York City Housing Authority and a head organizer for the Cricket in the Bronx league. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1938 and came to the US on December 10, 1950, whereupon he joined his parents, who had already immigrated. He did his elementary-middle schooling in Harlem, attended Stuyvesant High, and then went to CUNY Baruch for college, where he was (and continues to be) a member of the NAACP. He grew up playing cricket and soccer in …

Black Expressive Art, Resistant Cultural Politics, And The [Re] Performance Of Patriotism, Deborah Elizabeth Whaley

Trotter Review

During World War I, the Boston editor William Monroe Trotter described black American patriotism as a cautious endeavor and America's willingness to participate in the World War while it turned its back on domestic issues as misguided. In an era when freedom bypassed most black women and men within the nation-state of America and in an era of mass lynching in the American South, he proclaimed that black Americans and the U.S. government might refocus their efforts on making the world safer for "Negroes."

Like William Monroe Trotter, the rap group Public Enemy's rap odyssey "Welcome to the Terrordome," from …

A Historical Overview Of Poverty Among Blacks In Boston, 1950-1990, Robert C. Hayden

Trotter Review

Like most nineteenth-century residents of Boston, blacks worked hard to maintain their homes and families. Even before the Civil War, both enslaved and free blacks in "freedom's birthplace" worked long and arduous hours. Those who migrated to Boston from the South in the 1800s had come to secure higher wages, mobility, and opportunity for themselves and their families. Boston's black population grew from 2,000 in 1850 to 8,125 in 1890, and to 11,591 by 1900. In 1900, 39 percent of black Bostonians were northern-born (New England, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania), and 53 percent were southern-born.

Residential segregation for …

Pastor Brunson's Shofar, Richard Tenorio

Trotter Review

A short story by Richard Tenorio of sibling love and sacrificed ambition, which is set in Roxbury, traditionally the twentieth-century home territory for blacks in Boston. Today, Roxbury is poised on the lip of gentrification, and blacks in Boston are on the move again, seeking home and security and belonging.

Introduction, Barbara Lewis

Trotter Review

The Trotter Review, which has been published for over fifteen years, is entering a new phase. That is what the current issue represents, a marriage of old and new, a branching out into expanded territory that does not betray, we hope, the ideals or principles of the past.

What we have put together is historical and cultural and political. We raise questions. We draw connections and provide context as we focus on the local, the national, the international, and the diasporic. In addition, we give cognizance to the literary, as an expression of the urge to order the real, …

Madre Patria (Mother Country): Latino Identity And Rejections Of Blackness, Marta I. Cruz-Janzen

Trotter Review

When I was in third grade, in Puerto Rico, I wanted to be the Virgin Mary for the community Christmas celebration. A teacher promptly informed me that the mother of Christ could not be black. A girl with blonde hair and blue eyes was selected for the role, and I was given the role of a shepherd. In middle school, also in Puerto Rico, I played a house servant for a school play. Only children of black heritage played the slaves and servants. A white student with a painted face portrayed the only significant black character. All the other characters …

Race In Feminism: Critiques Of Bodily Self-Determination In Ida B. Wells And Anna Julia Cooper, Stephanie Athey

Trotter Review

If, as Angela Davis has argued, "the last decade of the nineteenth century was a critical moment in the development of modern racism," the same can be said of the development of modern feminism. Late nineteenth-century feminism, like institutional racism, saw "major institutional supports and ideological justifications" take shape across this period. Organizations of American women, both black and white, were shaping political arguments and crafting activist agendas in a post-Reconstruction America increasingly enamored of hereditary science, prone to lynching, and possessed of a virulent nationalism. This essay takes a historical view of "womanhood," bodily self-determination and well-being, concepts now …

Hinds, Burmadine, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

INTERVIEWER: Dr. Brian Purnell

INTERVIEWEE: Burmadine Hinds

SUMMARY BY: Andrew O’Connell

Burmadine Hinds was born on August 1, 1939 in Valhalla, New York, but moved to Williamsbridge at an early age after her mother shipped her South to live with foster parents. Recounting her early life in Williamsbridge, Hinds talk about a visible discrepancy between dark and light skinned black as far as social matters were concerned. Hinds recalls that the hue of one’s skin within the black community often dictated what church one went to and what social clubs one joined.

Hinds nostalgically describes the Northeast Bronx of the …

Wilkes, Quinton, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

One of the pioneering members of the African American Studies department at Fordham University, Dr. Quinton Wilkes was born in 1941 and raised in High Point, North Carolina. Living with his grandparents in the South, Wilkes would travel north every summer to stay with his mother and other family members residing in the Bronx, giving him a knowledge of the university at which he would later go on to have such a formidable role.

Wilkes remembrances of traveling by train every year from High Point to New York City provide interesting insight into Jim Crow segregation in the South toward …

Kissing Ass And Other Performative Acts Of Resistance: Austin, Fanon, And New Orleans Tourism, Lynnell L. Thomas

Lynnell Thomas

“Kissing Ass and other Performative Acts of Resistance: Austin, Fanon, and New Orleans Tourism” examines Frantz Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled” as a reconceptualization of J. L. Austin’s theory of the performative. Austin, whose examples of the performative all assume an equal, if not harmonious, relationship, overlooks instances of incompatibility and inequality. Fanon’s post-colonial framework, on the other hand, illustrates the markedly different types of intentions, uptake, and conventions which inform the speech act in cases of extreme inequality. In these cases, the powerless and seemingly voiceless use tacitly agreed upon conventions “inappropriately” to attain what they would not be able to …

Mainstreaming And Integrating The Substance And Spectacle Of Scholar-Baller: A New Game Plan For The Ncaa, Higher Education And Society, Keith Harrison

Dr. C. Keith Harrison

The purpose of this chapter is to theoretically and empirically capture the cultural divide between education and sport and entertainment in American society. The NCAA Academic Reform Movement has evolved from holding individuals accountable to presently monitoring institutions and their retention and graduation success of college student athletes. This movement will require a deeper examination of how culture influences academic attitudes and lifelong learning. Based on empirical data from different methodologies, this chapter proposes that student athletes; especially African American males, are often stereotyped with few strategies to empower their academic and athletic identities. The Scholar-Baller Paradigm is designed to …

Caines, Robert Jr., Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

INTERVIEWER: Oneka LaBennett, Mark Naison

INTERVIEWEE: Robert Caines, Jr. (a.k.a DJ Flawless)

SUMMARY BY: Patrick O’Donnell

Robert Caines, Jr. (aka DJ Flawless) was born on January 23, 1983, and grew up in the Mott Haven Projects in the Bronx. He is the son of Robert Caines, Sr. (aka Rockin’ Rob.) At the time of interview, he was unemployed, but had recently been working for the Scratch DJ Academy. Robert, Jr. was raised by his mother and his grandmother. Although his father was often absent, Robert, Jr. became interested in hip-hop by listening to his father’s music tapes. His mother, …

Dacosta, Lisa, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Interviewee: Lucy Dacosta

Interviewer: Dr. Mark Naison and Oneka LaBennett

Date of Interview: August 23, 2007

Summarized by Alice Stryker

Lucy was born in the South Bronx in 1967. Her paternal grandparents were from Jamaica and her grandmother was the matriarch of the family. Jamaican culture was very much a part of her upbringing. Her father worked for the Housing Authority.

She attended P.S. 28 for kindergarten and then transferred to St. Margaret Mary for several years. She enjoyed going to school there very much. She played with many of the kids of her neighborhood as well as with her …