Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"Accountable To No One": Confronting Police Power In Black Milwaukee, William I. Tchakirides

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation uncovers the roots of discriminatory police power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and traces Black-led efforts to make the city’s police bureaucracy more accountable to all citizens. It analyzes the politics of police reform in the century spanning the passage of two state laws that reconfigured Milwaukee’s law enforcement arrangements. The first (1885) removed City Hall’s managerial control over the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD). Corporate elites and social reformers fearful of rising working-class power and moral degeneration in the immigrant-industrial city lobbied for the statute’s enactment. The second (1984) reversed course, re-empowering non-police officials after decades of Black-led campaigns for …

The Impact Of Sunday School Participation On Spiritual Formation In African American Baptist Churches In North Carolina, Christopher Eugene Harris

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this correlational quantitative study was to determine a relationship between Sunday School participation and spiritual formation upon participating congregations of the General Baptist State Convention of North Carolina (GBSCNC). The process of spiritual formation comes through the spiritual disciplines being practiced. The spiritual disciplines were measured through the study sample of GBSCNC churches in this study using four spiritual development modes from the Christian Spiritual Participation Profile: growing through a relationship with God, growing through the Word, growing through critical reflection, and growing through relationships with others (Thayer, 1996). The research findings were based on a sample …

Green Thumbs: Cultivating Greenery And Personal Freedoms In Miné Okubo’S Citizen 13660 And Lorraine Hansberry’S A Raisin In The Sun, Akasha L. Khalsa

Conspectus Borealis

In her classic 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry explores the impacts of generations of violence, exploitation, and discrimination on an African American family in Chicago’s Southside. Throughout the play, a family house plant comes to symbolize the matriarch's hopes for her children, and her ability to nourish the plant reflects on her ability to fulfil her own modest dreams and provide for the dreams of her progeny. Similarly, we see plants fulfilling the same role in another tale of American racial injustice, namely Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660, an illustrated personal account of the artist’s experience …

Brew City Black Ball: Milwaukee As Microcosm Of The Early-Twentieth Century Black Baseball Experience, Ken Jon-Edward Bartelt

Theses and Dissertations

While historians have learned a great deal about the Black professional baseball played during organized baseball’s Jim Crow era, there are many teams whose stories are yet to be told. Two of these teams, the McCoy-Nolan Giants and Milwaukee Bears, played their home games in Milwaukee, Wisconsin during the 1920s. By exploring the untold histories of the McCoy-Nolan Giants and Milwaukee Bears, much can be learned about overarching themes in early-twentieth century Black professional baseball. By analyzing newspaper coverage of the McCoy-Nolan Giants, an independent barnstorming team without Negro League affiliation, important truths about the experience of Black baseball on …

African American Sacred Music And The Romantic Aesthetic, Brooksie Harrington

English Faculty Working Papers

Gospel music affects every aspect of African American culture, and the similarities between the African American sacred music aesthetic and the Romantic aesthetic share a theme of religiosity that is contained in the correlative of the mythopoetic “seam.” This seam meshes together analysis that explores the natural sublime, as suggested in the writings of such scholars as William Wordsworth, Pierre Proudhon, Samuel Coleridge, James Weldon Johnson, Henry L. Gates, and Anthony Heilbut.

The Impacts Of Incarceration On The Wellbeing Of Family Members Of African American Males Who Experience The U.S Prison System: A Phenomenological Study, Tremaine N. Leslie

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

African Americans encounter a high rate of imprisonment, and the social, economic, mental and other effects of imprisonment are extended to their families and communities (Roberts, 2004). In addition to separating individuals from their families and communities, incarceration maximizes the probability for fractured relationships, fragmented communities, and encumbers the public service systems (DeHart, Shapiro & Clone, 2018).Therefore, the purpose of this phenomenological inquiry was to explore the mental health effects of incarceration on the family members of African American males who experience the U.S prison system.

The theoretical framework utilized for this study was the critical race theory (CRT) immersed …

A War To Save Civilization: African American Soldiers In Britain During The Second World War, Joseph Dickinson

Voces Novae

During the Second World War, thousands of African American servicemen and women were sent to the British Isles as part of the war effort. Their arrival sparked a debate over American racial beliefs and how they would affect society in Britain, with many white Americans quickly finding that the locals were largely disapproving of the systems of segregation and discrimination common in the United States. Conflicts concerning race often escalated into violence between white soldiers, black soldiers, and the British civilians, forcing the American military to reevaluate their stance on discrimination and segregation in the armed forces.

Suspicious Minds: A Study Of The Attitudes That African Americans Held Regarding The Japanese During World War Ii, Timothy E. Buchanan

Honors Theses

This thesis explores African American viewpoints about the Japanese, from just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor up to Allied occupation of Japan after the Second World War. The primary sources for this thesis include Black newspapers, the papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as oral histories from African American veterans. The goal of this research is to provide a historical view of the African American perspective, both in the United States and abroad. This thesis also aims to fill the gap in the scholarship on this topic by bringing different groups …

In Search Of Harmony In Culture: An Analysis Of American Rock Music And The African American Experience, Cleopatra Boxill-Clark

Master of Arts in Humanities | Master's Theses 1936 - 2022

This thesis examines the relationship between the evolution of African American cultural identity and the evolution of rock and roll music. The Black Rock Coalition formed in 1985 as a group of black rock musicians who were frustrated that society had seemingly forgotten that rock and roll began with almost exclusively African American artists. They proposed a cultural reclaiming of rock and roll music in order to reestablish inclusiveness within the industry and within African American culture. I will retrace the narrative that the BRC suggests to discover how African American expression led to the creation of rhythm and blues, …

Woven, Adrienne Christian

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Woven is a collection of love poems about people of African descent, all of which feature clothing in some prominent way.

The why of what one wears runs deep. This creative work explores that connection.

Advisor: Kwame Dawes

Between Harlem And Paris: Haitian Internationalism In The Interwar Period, 1919-1937, Felix Jean-Louis Iii

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project locates the transnational contributions of elite Haitians to the efforts to remake blackness and mitigate the racial subjugation of people of African descent between 1919 and 1937. The arguments forwarded here are founded on archival materials such as letters, newspapers, personal documents, and the reports of government agents. Through my engagements with these documents, at times reading against the grain, I explore the ways in which my actors directed the course of events and shaped the discourses of major organizations that sought to affect Pan-African solidarity and promote anti-colonialism. It locates their participation two major sites interwar black …

Monkey Houses Or Revolutionary Legislatures? Moderating The Binary Of Black Politicians In South Carolina, Anna L. Biesecker-Mast

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

Writing this paper was an extensive process. It began early in the Spring semester—in ASI 120. From the beginning of the semester the ASI 120 students knew we would be writing a historiography in the realm of Reconstruction. To hone down a more specific topic, we were assigned Eric Foner’s A Short History of Reconstruction. By reading his account of Reconstruction, I was able to select a topic: black politicians in South Carolina. Next, a research librarian visited my seminar and introduced us to the research process. From there, I was able to gather sources and begin my annotated …

Toni Morrison: Biography, A Yęmisi Jimoh, Phd

A Yęmisi Jimoh

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Mandibular Attachment Device Effects On African American Veterans With Heart Failure, Tracey T. F. Carter

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Heart failure is a growing epidemic that affects people nationwide and is disproportionate to African Americans. The purpose of this quantitative repeated measures study was to determine whether mandibular attachment device (MAD) therapy impacts symptoms of heart failure in African American male veterans diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). The oxidative stress theory was applied in this study to assess whether MAD therapy received from Veterans Affairs (VA) dental clinics impacted heart failure symptoms, after controlling for patient body mass index (BMI) levels and smoking status. Research questions examined whether MAD had a significant effect on symptoms of heart failure …

Issues Of Modernity In Russian And U.S. Southern Discourse: Literary And Cinematic Crosscurrents, Zachary John Killebrew

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation traces formulations of modernity, national and regional identity, and economy in the literature and film of Russia and the U.S. South from serfdom to the Second World War. Studying serf and slave narratives, Russian Realist and Southern Renaissance novels such as The Brothers Karamazov (1879), Demons (1872), The Sound and the Fury (1929), Tobacco Road (1932), and Wise Blood (1952), and American and Soviet films such as Volga, Volga (1938) and Cabin in the Sky (1943), this examination locates within Russo-Southern discourses a shared interest in striking out against Western or Northern epistemologies to assert a “peripheral” modernity …

Relationship Between Parental Involvement And 4th-5th Grade Students’ Academic Motivation, Charla Williams

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The achievement gap between African American and White students has been well documented. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine whether parental involvement in academics predicted academic motivation of fourth- and fifth-grade African American students in the Southwest United States. Social development theory provided the framework for the study. Survey data were collected from 43 students and 43 parents using the Parental Involvement Scale and the Children’s Academic Intrinsic Motivation Inventory. A t test, linear regression, and multiple regression were used to analyze the data. Findings indicated no significant difference between how parents and students perceived parental involvement …

The Executive Director Experiences Of African American Women In Mainstream Nonprofit Performing Arts Organizations, Davida S. Gobin

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

African American women are presently underrepresented in mainstream nonprofit performing arts organizations (PAOs) throughout the United States. Despite this inequality, a small number of African American women have overcome the odds and have productively earned senior leadership roles as executive directors in mainstream nonprofit PAOs. Using the conceptual frameworks of intersectionality and critical race feminism, the purpose of this study was to explore the shared lived experiences of African American women in executive director positions and the impact of race and gender on their leadership development and training for advancement in a mainstream nonprofit PAO. Four research questions explored the …

“Dialogical Offense:” A Postcolonial Womanist Deconstruction Of The Colonial Experience Of African American Women Through U.S. Institutional Apparatus Known As Criminal Justice Policy, April Michelle Woodson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Black female experience in the United States is a colonized existence. This project’s analysis is specific to the North American U.S. geographic space and is not a diasporic project. Black women suffered from the greatest increase in the percentage of inmates incarcerated for drug offenses in the 1980’s and 1990’s which is the period of criminal justice policy formation and implementation on which this project is focused.

This project is uniquely situated in the overlap between womanist ethics and postcolonial feminist imagination and extends scholarship in both discourses by showing that there is an interwoven line between the colonial-to-contemporary …

Black Minds Matter: A Phenomenological Inquiry Examining The Prevalence Of Racial Trauma Among Black Doctoral Students, Jazmyne Markeeva Peters

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Systemic and institutionalized racism is endemic to life in the United States and contributes to the daily marginalization of Black people. While the negative psychological and physiological effects of racism have been well-documented, the notion that racism can be experienced as a trauma is a newer theory. Racial trauma has been understudied and underappreciated, though it is a theory that clinicians should incorporate when working with Black clients and other clients of color. Exploring the ways in which Black doctoral students attending a predominantly White institution (PWI) have experienced racism is an essential contribution to the existing racial trauma literature. …

Persistence Of African American Students At Predominately White Institutions, Candace Thompson

Masters Theses

Using qualitative methodology, the persistence of African American students at predominately White institutions was analyzed. This was conducted through semi-structured interviews by six participants which evaluated African American students’ overall persistence. Participants expressed what determined their selections of institutions as well as what institutional and personal factors negatively and positively affected their matriculation throughout the institution. In addition, the study provided recommendations to student affairs professionals to better serve this population.

Black Is Every Color, Alisa Banks, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Artists' Books

1 volume (8 unnumbered pages) : color illustrations ; in box 11.5 x 12.5 x 12.5 cm. Unique book. Artist's statement: Black, the sum of all colors, mysterious, all-encompassing, a shroud, a swarm. Familiar but unknowable, coveted and uncontained. This book work considers the encompassing nature of blackness. Box containing painted cube surrounded by four flaps featuring single signature books. Each stitched cover opens to reveal a poem about the color black. Media: Book cloth, book board, paper, acrylic paint, graphite, glass, embroidery thread, silk, watercolor, graphite. "Created while watching spring bloom and events unfold during COVID-19."--artist's website. Curated title …