Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Happy Accident, Robert Manning

New England Journal of Public Policy

In "The Happy Accident," Robert Manning's delightful memoir of his early newspaper days in Binghamton, New York, we are brought back to an earlier and seemingly more innocent time when New England — and America — stood on the threshold of change. The moral of going home, it seems, is that as much changes, much never changes — something we should perhaps remember in these last feverish days of the nineteen eighties.

Thinking Of England, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

Shaun O'Connell, in "Thinking of England," examines the current state of "purely English" literature and concludes that "there will be worthy books on the critical, if not terminal, condition of England."

The works discussed in this article include: Latecomers, by Anita Brookner; A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers, by Hugh Kenner; Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin; The Russia House, by John le Carre; The Fifth Child, by Doris Lessing; Nice Work, by David Lodge; and Out of the Shelter, by David Lodge.

Book Review Essay: Black Literature And Society In The Eighteenth Century, Rhett S. Jones

Trotter Review

The eighteenth century, a growing consensus among historians suggests, was a crucial period in the evolution of racism. Most Europeans entered the century with few fixed ideas on the nature of race and instead thought of themselves and others primarily in ethnic and religious terms. The English who invaded Jamaica (then colonized and occupied by the Spaniards) in 1655, for example, saw themselves as English Christians and the defenders of the island as Spanish “Papists.” Papists for the English of the time were not Christians at all but instead persons enlisted in the army of the anti-Christ. Nearly a century …

System-Wide Title Vi Regulation Of Higher Education, 1968-1988: Implications For Increased Minority Participation, John B. Williams

Trotter Review

In 1964, 300,000 blacks were enrolled in the nation’s higher education system, most of them attending black colleges and universities in the South; 4,700,000 whites attended colleges during the same year. With passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Law, the federal government acknowledged an inequity in blacks’ opportunity to attend college and gave promise of becoming a major source of pressure for desegregating higher education. But the potential of Title VI, the promise of government intervention to accomplish greater equity, has never been fulfilled.

Specifically, Title VI renders discriminatory agencies and institutions, including colleges and universities, ineligible to receive federal …

Commentary: The Role Of Universities In Racial Violence On Campuses, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

Racial violence against blacks on college campuses across the country has become a source of consider able and legitimate concern. This paper reviews the nature and extent of these incidents, discusses the national social context of their occurrence, and examines the role that universities play in the development of these incidents.

Book Review: The Poor And The Powerless: Economic Policy And Change In The Caribbean, By Clive Y. Thomas, Winston Langley

Trotter Review

With only brief interludes, the Caribbean area has for the past five centuries been a center of global power struggles and internal sociopolitical upheavals of the first order. Those struggles and upheavals show no signs of abating as we move into the twenty-first century. Indeed, there appears to be a consensus among scholars and political leaders in the region that the area now faces problems of crisis proportions.

Sports Notes, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

The recent conviction of sports agents Norby Walters and Lloyd Bloom on charges of racketeering and fraud may hasten the day when college sports will be seen as the businesses they are, and college athletes will be seen as “subminimum-wage” em ployees of these businesses. Certainly, Bloom and Walters are unsavory characters; they are guilty of several criminal activities, including extortion. But what should not go unnoticed is the fact that they were found guilty of committing fraud against colleges because they signed athletes to contracts before their college eligibility was up.

In other sports news, after nine years on …

Interview With George Guscott, Abha Pandya

Trotter Review

George Guscott was born in 1927 in Boston. An engineer with a degree from Northeastern University, he worked in an engineering firm for many years before branching off, very successfully, into real estate development. His firm, Long Bay Management Company, which he manages with his two brothers, is one of the largest minority-owned real estate companies in the city of Boston, In a ride in his van through Roxbury and Dorchester, Guscott proudly pointed to all the real estate he owns and spoke reflectively about the struggles and victories he encountered over the years to get to where he is …

Book Review: The Arrogance Of Race: Historical Perspectives On Slavery, Racism, And Social Inequality, Vernon J. Williams Jr.

Trotter Review

The Arrogance of Race is George M. Fredrick son’s latest work, and it is a profound one. This series of articles, many of which have been published previously, was written over a span of some 20 years and represents the mature reflections of one of this country’s leading intellectual historians. The work should be read by all serious students of race and racism.

African-Americans And Social Policy In The 1990'S, Wornie L. Reed

William Monroe Trotter Institute Publications

The basic social policy issue for African-Americans in the next decade will be a perennial objective - to have policies instituted that will bring them into the economic and social mainstreams of America. The main problems currently faced by blacks are quite familiar: inequalities in economic and social conditions. The new wrinkle in the 1980s is a downturn in racial progress, a downturn that is seen whether one is examining attitudes or specific social policies.

Racial divisions have increased sharply. The Reagan Administration's war against affirmative action, its refusal to allow access to decision-making by minorities, its fight against civil …

Howth Castle - Vol. 04, No. 01 - 1989, University Of Massachusetts Boston

Howth Castle (1985-1993)

No abstract provided.

Home To New England, Alfred Alcorn

New England Journal of Public Policy

In "Home to New England," Alfred Alcorn adds a very personal dimension to our ongoing search for the characteristics that define the New England ethic. Visiting his father-in-law's home, built in Chelmsford in 1690, became an experience "a little like touching history itself, the vernacular history of a simple, hardworking and yet cannily sophisticated people."

The Eritrean People's Liberation Front: A Case Study In The Rhetoric And Practice Of African Liberation, Tsenay Serequeberhan

William Monroe Trotter Institute Publications

The views of the various African thinkers, which will be systematically explored in this Study, are neither "true" in any absolute sense, nor are they an "ideology" or false consciousness. Rather, they are the self-expression of an open-ended historical process. The works of Fanon, Cesaire, Cabral, etc., with which we shall be engaged in formulating the overall perspective of the struggle for African freedom as a discourse aimed at reclaiming history, are the self-expression of this process itself. These works are the artful and effective self-presentation of those engaged in the struggle, i.e., the rhetoric of African liberation.

The basic …

Commentary: Blacks In U.S. History, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

During Black History Month many people paused to discuss and reflect on the presence and the contributions of African-Americans in the history of the United States. During February two years ago we had a visit from a white Navy veteran from nearby Quincy, Massachusetts, who had his own black history story — although he did not express it as such.

Telling The Story Of The Early Black Aviators, Philip S. Hart

Trotter Review

The story of America’s early black aviators from the 1920s and 1930s has been one of the neglected themes in American aviation history. My interest in this topic began with research into family history. My mother’s uncle, J. Herman Banning, was a pioneer black aviator during this nation’s Golden Age of Aviation. I remember my mother, aunt, and grandmother talking about J. Herman Banning back when I was little, and in my teenage years I tried to find out more than I had learned from these family stories and photographs, but it was difficult for me to locate any information …

Tri-Racial Enculturation: Red, White, And Black In The South, Rhett S. Jones

Trotter Review

In an essay published in The Western Journal of Black Studies (1977) I pointed out that while for many years the study of relations between blacks and Native Americans had been neglected by historians and other scholars, recent studies had acknowledged that red folk and black often influenced one another. What I did not point out was that, for the United States. studies of tri-racial contact were almost nonexistent. Things were quite different in studies of Latin America where the realities of social and sexual contact among all three races were reflected not only in works by historians but in …

Black New England: Building On The Work Of Lorenzo Johnston Greene, Rhett S. Jones

Trotter Review

With the death this spring of Dr. Lorenzo J. Greene, Professor Emeritus of History at Lincoln University (Missouri), historians of blacks in New England have lost one of their pioneers, a man who continued to support the scholarly study of Afro-Americans in the region throughout his life. Dr. Greene, who was 89 at his death, was best known as the author of The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776 (1942). Benjamin Quarles wrote of the book, “To it we are indebted for three things, if not more—for filling a gap in the literature of American colonial history, for portraying a …

Vantage Points: Prose Parables Of The Republic, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

Shaun O'Connell brings his usual insights to his book review essay. "Our novelists," he concludes, "have served us better than our politicians in classifying our condition" — an accomplishment that is somewhat less grand than it seems when we remember that the recent competition came from George Bush's "Read my lips" and "A thousand points of light" and Michael Dukakis's "Good jobs at good wages" and "I'm on your side."

Among the works discussed in this essay: Firebird, by James Carroll; Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories, by Raymond Carver; Paris Trout, by Pete Dexter; …

Miscegenation And Acculturation In The Narragansett Country Of Rhode Island, 1710-1790, Rhett S. Jones

Trotter Review

The histories of most New England states view blacks as a strange, foreign people enslaved in southern states, whom New Englanders rescued first by forming colonization and abolitionist societies and later by fighting a Civil War to free them. The existence of a black population in New England as early as the seventeenth century has been pretty much ignored. Indeed Anderson and Marten, of the Parting Ways Museum of Afro-American Ethnohistory, touched off a furor with their discovery that Abraham Pearse, one of the early residents of Plymouth Colony, was black.

The long neglect of New England’s black history has …