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The Cost Of Curls: Discrimination, Social Stigma, And Identity Oppression Of Black Women Through Their Hair, Sydney Baylor
The Cost Of Curls: Discrimination, Social Stigma, And Identity Oppression Of Black Women Through Their Hair, Sydney Baylor
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This thesis analyzes the discriminatory practices facing Black women in a multitude of arenas and spaces as a result of their hairstyles and texture. A marker of, as well as a way to express, identity, Black women’s hair is more heavily policed than that of their White counterparts and manifests itself in the form of decreased job opportunities, public humiliation, and restricted stylistic choice. The highly visible nature of hair makes it a prime target for unfair targeting by authoritative bodies, working to further ‘other’ the Black female body along with skin-tone. Looking first at how Black women navigate the …
Two Sides Of The Same Token: An Examination Of Segregation, Memory, And White Supremacy In Contemporary Church Schools, Vania B. Blaiklock
Two Sides Of The Same Token: An Examination Of Segregation, Memory, And White Supremacy In Contemporary Church Schools, Vania B. Blaiklock
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This thesis is a portfolio containing two essays about private Christian church schools with an introductory essay to connect both projects. The first essay, “A Convergence of Purpose: Segregation and White Supremacy in Contemporary Church Schools,” is a comprehensive examination of the development and creation of church schools that first looks at the distinction between church schools and segregation academies, and then assesses the relevance that the distinction, or the lack thereof, plays in maintaining white supremacy in contemporary church schools. The second essay, “The Trauma of Tokenism: Desegregation, Memory, and White Supremacy in Contemporary Church Schools,” considers the modern …
"It's Not Meant For Us": Exploring The Intersection Of Gentrification, Public Education, And Black Identity In Washington, D.C., Shea Winsett
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation discusses themes of racial identity, meaning of space, and class through an exploration of the intersection of gentrification and public education in Washington, D.C. Through analysis of middle-class responses to gentrification I argue, 1) that the public education system is a site of gentrification, as it has become a site of capitalistic development and Black displacement; 2) that the American concept of race, including race relations, is not an aberration of typical American society, but a defining cultural feature; and 3) the best way to understand race and class in America is to use theory constructed from the …
“When I Put On My Firespitter Mask”: Jayne Cortez’S (R)Evolutionary Musical Poetic Collaborations, Renee Michelle Kingan
“When I Put On My Firespitter Mask”: Jayne Cortez’S (R)Evolutionary Musical Poetic Collaborations, Renee Michelle Kingan
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
From the 1960s, through the Black Arts Movement, until her sudden death in December 2012, Jayne Cortez used her dynamic voice to fight oppression. as the first multiple-chapter study of Cortez’s musical collaborations, this dissertation adds to a growing body of critical work that examines Cortez’s radical poetry. In her “African Confluences” keynote address at Rutgers University, Cortez described herself as a member of a global community of black writers “protesting and calling for an end to self degradation, self fragmentation, self-corruption, and self-fear and selfishness… Poets using the image of Blackness to mean continuity, confidence, creativity and new possibilities.” …
Sea Of Change : Race, Abolitionism, And Reform In The New England Whale Fishery, Justin Andrew Pariseau
Sea Of Change : Race, Abolitionism, And Reform In The New England Whale Fishery, Justin Andrew Pariseau
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Bound together across lines of color and lass, Nantucket and New Bedford residents pursued the unique economic opportunities presented by whaling during the nineteenth century. Whaling was becoming a major industrial enterprise with few available options to fulfill the labor needs required for the whaling crews, ropewalks, blacksmith shops, and sail lofts that made it possible for Nantucket and New Bedford whaleships to transit the globe. Whaling thus generated the jobs that made it possible for free black communities to thrive. People of color consequently turned the need for labor to their advantage. Drawn by the financial opportunities that the …
African American Civil Rights Museums: A Study Of The R.R Moton Museum In Farmville, Virginia, Christina S. Draper
African American Civil Rights Museums: A Study Of The R.R Moton Museum In Farmville, Virginia, Christina S. Draper
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
Nineteenth Century Enslaved African Americans' Coping Strategies For The Stresses Of Enslavement In Virginia, Allison Michelle Campo
Nineteenth Century Enslaved African Americans' Coping Strategies For The Stresses Of Enslavement In Virginia, Allison Michelle Campo
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
The Life And Legacy Of Marie Couvent: Social Networks, Property Ownership, And The Making Of A Free People Of Color Community In New Orleans., Elizabeth Clark Neidenbach
The Life And Legacy Of Marie Couvent: Social Networks, Property Ownership, And The Making Of A Free People Of Color Community In New Orleans., Elizabeth Clark Neidenbach
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation recovers the life of Marie Justine Sirnir Couvent and the Atlantic World she inhabited. Born in Africa around 1757, she was enslaved as a child and shipped to Saint-Domingue through the Bight of Benin in the 1760s. In the tumult of the Haitian Revolution, Couvent fled the island, along with tens of thousands of Saint-Domingue inhabitants. She resettled in New Orleans where she eventually died a free and wealthy slaveholder in 1837. Although illiterate, Couvent left property to establish a free black school in her will. L'Institution Catholique des Orphelins Indigents was founded on her land in 1847 …
The Technique Of The Poquoson-Style Log Canoe, David Andrews Moran
The Technique Of The Poquoson-Style Log Canoe, David Andrews Moran
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
An Enslaved Landscape: The Virginia Plantation At The End Of The Seventeenth Century, David Arthur Brown
An Enslaved Landscape: The Virginia Plantation At The End Of The Seventeenth Century, David Arthur Brown
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Lewis Burwell II designed Fairfield plantation in Gloucester County to be the most sophisticated and successful architectural and agricultural effort in late seventeenth-century Virginia. He envisioned a physical framework with the intent to control the world around him so that he might profit from growing tobacco, while raising his family's status to the highest in the colony through the display of wealth and knowledge and the enslavement of both Africans and the natural surroundings. The landscape he envisioned contrasted with those of the enslaved Africans he purchased and put to work in the fields and buildings surrounding his '1694 brick …
Thoroughly Modern: African American Women's Dress And The Culture Of Consumption In Cleveland, Ohio 1890-1940, Deanda Marie Johnson
Thoroughly Modern: African American Women's Dress And The Culture Of Consumption In Cleveland, Ohio 1890-1940, Deanda Marie Johnson
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
African American women have been absent from much of the writing on consumption and the making of modernity. This dissertation responds to these absences, using dress, a highly visible form of consumption, to examine how African American women in Cleveland, Ohio experienced modernity through the culture of consumption from 1890-1940, in the context of urbanization, migration, and the Great Depression.;In looking at African American women's dress during this period, this dissertation will explore the clothed body not simply as a theoretical abstraction, but part of a lived experience in which production and consumption are not mutually exclusive. This will help …
Seeing (For) Miles: Jazz, Race, And Objects Of Performance, Benjamin Park Anderson
Seeing (For) Miles: Jazz, Race, And Objects Of Performance, Benjamin Park Anderson
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Using jazz trumpeter Miles Davis (1926-1991) as its primary example, "Seeing (for) Miles" attempts to build on a growing discourse related to the intersection of jazz, race, and visual / material culture that has heretofore largely ignored the role of consumption. Davis' numerous decisions to spend money on expensive things and/or have them custom made, insisting these things be seen by others, and overseeing his image in advertisements are a reminder that famous musicians often found themselves straddling the line between being consumers and objects of consumption. Following Davis on both sides of that line also necessitates following him on …
'I Get A Kick Out Of You': Cinematic Revisions Of The History Of The African American Cowboy In The American West, Stephanie Anne Maguire
'I Get A Kick Out Of You': Cinematic Revisions Of The History Of The African American Cowboy In The American West, Stephanie Anne Maguire
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
Honoring The Ancestors: Historical Reclamation And Self-Determined Identities In Richmond And Rio De Janeiro, Autumn Rain Duke Barrett
Honoring The Ancestors: Historical Reclamation And Self-Determined Identities In Richmond And Rio De Janeiro, Autumn Rain Duke Barrett
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation focuses on how history is made meaningful in the present. I argue that within the United States and Brazil, historic narratives and sites are employed in legitimizing and contesting past and contemporary social inequity. National, regional, and local narratives tell the stories of how communities and their members came to be who and where they are in the present. Social hierarchies and inequity are naturalized and/or questioned through historic narratives. Formative education includes telling these stories to children. Commemorative events and monuments tell and re-tell stories to community members of all ages. Enculturation of historical identities, the positioning …
Dispositions And Practices That Promote Teacher-Student Relationships With African-American Male Elementary Students, Karyn Mitchell Yeldell
Dispositions And Practices That Promote Teacher-Student Relationships With African-American Male Elementary Students, Karyn Mitchell Yeldell
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This research study was focused on teacher dispositions and practices that create positive teacher-student relationships with African-American elementary male students. Robert Pianta's work on relationships between teachers and students, over the past decade, provided a conceptual framework for this specific study. A review of the literature on this topic evidenced practices that positively and negatively impact teacher-student relationships. Through classroom observations and interviews, the perceptions of elementary teachers were examined on how they actually create teacher-student relationships with their African-American male students. These perceptions were insightful and often supported in the research literature. Effective teachers understand the need for praise, …
Factors That Contribute To The Academic Success Of African American Males: Perceptions Of African American Male High School Students, Alexis C. Swanson
Factors That Contribute To The Academic Success Of African American Males: Perceptions Of African American Male High School Students, Alexis C. Swanson
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Much of the literature dedicated to the academic achievement of African American males focuses on failure, obstacles, negative influences and explanations of factors that negatively impact their academic success. This qualitative research study provided an opportunity for African American male students at the high school level to articulate their experiences and speak to the factors that they perceived as contributing to their academic success. The constructs of identity and cultural capital were offered by this researcher as a conceptual framework into the insight of factors that impacted the academic achievement of this student group.;Through interviews, a classroom observation and document …
Gathering Places, Cultivating Spaces: An Archaeology Of A Chesapeake Neighborhood Through Enslavement And Emancipation, 1775--1905, Jon Jason Boroughs
Gathering Places, Cultivating Spaces: An Archaeology Of A Chesapeake Neighborhood Through Enslavement And Emancipation, 1775--1905, Jon Jason Boroughs
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This study is a community-level analysis of an African American plantation neighborhood grounded in archaeological excavations at the Quarterpath Site (44WB0124), an antebellum quartering complex and post-Emancipation tenant residence occupied circa 1840s-1905 in lower James City County, Virginia. It asserts that the Quarterpath domestic quarter was a gathering place, a locus of social interaction in a vibrant and long established Chesapeake plantation neighborhood complex.;By the antebellum period, as marriage "abroad," or off-plantation, became the most common form of long term social union within plantation communities, enslaved social and kin ties in the Chesapeake region were typically geographically dispersed, enjoining multiple …
Community Building After Emancipation: An Anthropological Study Of Charles' Corner, Virginia, 1862-1922, Shannon Sheila Mahoney
Community Building After Emancipation: An Anthropological Study Of Charles' Corner, Virginia, 1862-1922, Shannon Sheila Mahoney
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
The half-century marked by the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I was a critical period of cultural, social, and economic transition for African Americans in the southern United States. During the late nineteenth century, while African Americans were rebuilding communities and networks disrupted by enslavement and the ensuing Civil War, several settlements developed between Williamsburg and Yorktown on Virginia's lower peninsula. One of the settlements, Charles' Corner, is an optimal case study for understanding the gradual process of community building during a particularly challenging period of African American history dominated by systemic racism and …
Derogatory To The Rights Of Free-Born Subjects: Racialization And The Identity Of The Williamsburg Area's Free Black Population From 1723-1830, Rebecca Anne Schumann
Derogatory To The Rights Of Free-Born Subjects: Racialization And The Identity Of The Williamsburg Area's Free Black Population From 1723-1830, Rebecca Anne Schumann
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
A Critical Study Of Black Parents' Participation In Special Education Decision-Making, Tamara Lynn Freeman-Nichols
A Critical Study Of Black Parents' Participation In Special Education Decision-Making, Tamara Lynn Freeman-Nichols
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
How Direct Descendants Of A School Lockout Achieved Academic Success: Resilience In The Educational Attainments Of Prince Edward County's Children, Randolph Williams
How Direct Descendants Of A School Lockout Achieved Academic Success: Resilience In The Educational Attainments Of Prince Edward County's Children, Randolph Williams
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
A Union Of Church And State: The Freedmen's Bureau And The Education Of African Americans In Virginia From 1865--1871, Aaron Jason Butler
A Union Of Church And State: The Freedmen's Bureau And The Education Of African Americans In Virginia From 1865--1871, Aaron Jason Butler
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
In 2003, the Virginia Department of Education authorized a committee of 11 teachers to write a report detailing Virginia's public education history. The committee drafted a document that provided a chronological account of the major developments in public education in Virginia from 1607 to 2003. The document provided minimal coverage of the history of Virginia's African American population, specifically during the Antebellum (1830s-1860s) and Reconstruction (1865-1871) eras. The history of public education for Virginia's African American population, 1865-1870, was completely omitted from the document. The post-Civil-War era was a critical time period in both United States and Virginia educational history …
No Longer Lost At Sea: Black Community Building In The Virginia Tidewater, 1865 To The Post-1954 Era, Hollis E. Pruitt
No Longer Lost At Sea: Black Community Building In The Virginia Tidewater, 1865 To The Post-1954 Era, Hollis E. Pruitt
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
...the early people of Gloucester County were English gentlemen and ladies... Many of these fine old families continued wealthy for generations, until about seventy years ago, when a terrible war, known as the War between the States,... deprived them and their present day descendents of their property and wealth, as well as their Negro slaves who were freed at the time of this war.(Gray 66).;All across the post-Civil War South, the newly freed African Diaspora struggled to find ways to maintain their families and to develop communities. Having been systematically denied education, property ownership, political participation and participation in both …
Dooley's Ferry: The Archaeology Of A Civilian Community In Wartime, Carl Gilbert Drexler
Dooley's Ferry: The Archaeology Of A Civilian Community In Wartime, Carl Gilbert Drexler
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Warfare and conflict are familiar topics to anthropologists, but it is only recently that anthropological archaeologists moved to create a discrete specialization, known as Conflict Archaeology. Practitioners now actively pursue research in a number of different areas, such as battlefields, fortifications, and troop encampments. These advances throw into sharp relief areas that need greater focus. This dissertation addresses one of these shortcomings by focusing on the home front by studying Dooley's Ferry, a hamlet that once lay on the banks of the Red River, in southwest Arkansas. Before the American Civil War, it was a node in the commodity chains …
I'M Really Just An American: The Archaeological Importance Of The Black Towns In The American West And Late-Nineteenth Century Constructions Of Blackness, Shea Aisha Winsett
I'M Really Just An American: The Archaeological Importance Of The Black Towns In The American West And Late-Nineteenth Century Constructions Of Blackness, Shea Aisha Winsett
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
Strange Fruit: Images Of African Americans In Advertising Cards And Postcards, 1860-1930, Meghan Brooke Holder
Strange Fruit: Images Of African Americans In Advertising Cards And Postcards, 1860-1930, Meghan Brooke Holder
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
A Bold Promise: Black Readjusters And The Founding Of Virginia State University, Leigh Alexandra Soares
A Bold Promise: Black Readjusters And The Founding Of Virginia State University, Leigh Alexandra Soares
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
No abstract provided.
Race News: How Black Reporters And Readers Shaped The Fight For Racial Justice, 1877--1978, Frederick James Carroll
Race News: How Black Reporters And Readers Shaped The Fight For Racial Justice, 1877--1978, Frederick James Carroll
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Between 1877 and 1978, black reporters, publishers, and readers engaged in a never-ending and ever-shifting protest against American racism. Journalists' militancy oscillated as successive generations of civil rights activists defined anew their relationship with racism and debated the relevance of black radicalism in the fight for racial justice. Journalists achieved their greatest influence when their political perspectives aligned with the views of their employers and readers. Frequent disputes, though, erupted over the scope and meaning of racial justice within the process of reporting the news, compelling some writers to start alternative publications that challenged the assimilationist politics promoted by profit-minded …
Learning How To Listen': Analyzing Style And Meaning In The Music Of Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone And Cassandra Wilson, Lashonda Katrice Barnett
Learning How To Listen': Analyzing Style And Meaning In The Music Of Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone And Cassandra Wilson, Lashonda Katrice Barnett
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Learning How to Listen': Analyzing Style and Meaning in the Music of Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone and Cassandra Wilson examines the similarities of singing styles and core narrative traits in the original songs of three African American women vocalist-composers celebrated within the jazz idiom. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, including over 150 hours of personal interviews with musicians, attendance of jazz concerts and festivals both domestic and abroad, and a three-year listening journal (based on live performances and recordings), 'Learning How to Listen' is an Africana cultural studies product informed by vibrant multidisciplinary scholarship that bridges Jazz studies, Linguistics …
Real Talk: Blackness And Whiteness In The Works Of Jefferson Pinder, Dave Chappelle, And Aaron Mcgruder, Jeffreen M. Hayes
Real Talk: Blackness And Whiteness In The Works Of Jefferson Pinder, Dave Chappelle, And Aaron Mcgruder, Jeffreen M. Hayes
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
"Real Talk: Blackness and Whiteness in the Works of Jefferson Pinder, Dave Chappelle, and Aaron McGruder" will examine twenty-first century constructions of race by African Americans. I am interested in how visual artist Jefferson Pinder, comedian Dave Chappelle, and comic artist Aaron McGruder interrogate and incorporate race, particularly whiteness, into their respective works. Each artist challenges hegemonic constructions of race, utilizing technology and taking full advantage of our visualized culture to present their examinations of race. I selected the artists because of their intimate knowledge of their respective crafts, their use of popular culture, and their diverse perspectives on race …