History Commons^™

The Integration Of African Americans In The Civilian Conservation Corps In Massachusetts, Caitlin E. Pinkham

Graduate Masters Theses

The Civilian Conservation Corps employed young white and black men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. In 1935 Robert Fechner, the Director of the Civilian Conservation Corps, ordered the segregation of Corps camps across the country. Massachusetts’ camps remained integrated due in large part to low funding and a small African American population. The experiences of Massachusetts’ African American population present a new general narrative of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Federal government imposed a three percent African American quota, ensuring that African Americans participated in Massachusetts as the Civilian Conservation Corps expanded. This quota represents a Federal acknowledgement …

Race Patriots: Black Poets, Transnational Identity, And Diasporic Versification In The United States Before The New Negro, Jason T. Hendrickson

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the contributions of black poets in the United States before the New Negro / Harlem Renaissance Movement. Specifically, it focuses on their role in creating and maintaining a tradition of regional transnationalism in their verses that celebrates their African ancestry. I contend that these poets are best understood as “race patriots”; that is, they at once sought inclusion within the nation-state in the form of full citizenship, yet recognized allegiances beyond the nation-state on account of race through a recognition of shared African ancestry across borders. Their verses point to a shared kinship – be it through …

Creating The Ideal Mexican: 20th And 21st Century Racial And National Identity Discourses In Oaxaca, Savannah N. Carroll

Doctoral Dissertations

This investigation intends to uncover past and contemporary socioeconomic significance of being a racial other in Oaxaca, Mexico and its relevance in shaping Mexican national identity. The project has two purposes: first, to analyze activities and observations of cultural missionaries in Oaxaca during the 1920s and 1930s, and second to relate these findings to historical and present implications of blackness in an Afro-Mexican community. Cultural missionaries were appointed by the Secretary of Public Education (SEP) to create schools throughout Mexico, focusing on the modernization of marginalized communities through formal and social education. This initiative was intended to resolve socioeconomic disparities …

To "Plant Our Trees On American Soil, And Repose Beneath Their Shade": Africa, Colonization, And The Evolution Of A Black Identity Narrative In The United States, 1808-1861, Edward Jason Vickers

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work explores the role that ideas about Africa played in the development of a specifically American identity among free blacks in the United States, from the early nineteenth century to the Civil War. Previous studies of the writings of free blacks in the Revolutionary period, and of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which was devoted to removing them back to an African homeland, have suggested that black discussions of Africa virtually disappeared after 1816, when the colonization movement began. However, as this work illustrates, the letters, books, newspapers, and organizational records produced by free blacks in the antebellum era …

Residential Segregation In Norfolk, Virginia: How The Federal Government Reinforced Racial Division In A Southern City, 1914-1959, Kevin Lang Ringelstein

History Theses & Dissertations

This thesis examines how Norfolk, Virginia maintained residential segregation between the years 1914, when the city passed its first segregation ordinance, and 1959, when it received the All-America City Award for its massive slum clearance projects. By focusing on federal government initiatives in Norfolk, it shows that Norfolk’s leaders used the federal government’s assistance to map, analyze, and remove the city’s African American slums. Ultimately, it highlights the central role the federal government played in perpetuating residential segregation in Norfolk and how it opened a space for Norfolk’s leaders to act on their prejudice.

This thesis demonstrates that in the …

The Physical Uplift Of The Race: The Emergence Of The African American Physical Culture Movement, 1900-1930, J. Anthony Guillory

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation, “The Physical Uplift of the Race: The Emergence of the African American Physical Culture Movement, 1900—1930,” situates the early twentieth century of African American physical culture within a historical narrative that shaped philosophical viewpoints of African American urban community development. Previous inquiries of related topics attempt to describe a physical culture movement that was somehow separate and apart from the larger historical narrative of African people in the United States. My work does not continue in that vein. My objective is to illustrate how the black physical culture movement was primarily a reaction to African Americans’ new geo-political …

Imaging Her Selves: Black Women Artists, Resistance, Image And Representation, 1938-1956, Heather Zahra Caldwell

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses specifically on dancer Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), pianist Hazel Scott (1920-1981), cartoonist Jackie Ormes (1911-1985), singer Lena Horne (1917-2010), and graphic artist, painter, and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012). It explores the artistic, performative, and political resistance deployed by these five African-American women activists, artists, and performers in the period between 1937 and 1957. The principal form of resistance employed by these women was cultural resistance. Using a mixture of archival research, first person interview, biography, as well as other primary and secondary sources, I explore how these women constructed personas, representations, and media images of African-American women to …

The Unheard New Negro Woman: History Through Literature, Shantell Lee

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Many of the Harlem Renaissance anthologies and histories of the movement marginalize and omit women writers who played a significant role in it. They neglect to include them because these women worked outside of socially determined domestic roles and wrote texts that portrayed women as main characters rather than as muses for men or supporting characters. The distorted representation of women of the Renaissance will become clearer through the exploration of the following texts: Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, Caroline Bond Day’s “Pink Hat,” Dorothy West’s “Mammy,” Angelina Grimke’s Rachel and “Goldie,” and Georgia Douglas Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in …

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 …

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 …

Race, Labor, And Migration: The Legacy Of The Fepc And Puget Sound Navy Yard, Aaron Chapman

History Undergraduate Theses

This paper is an exploration of the experiences of black workers at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard during the Second World War. The primary focus is on the immediate effects of President Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802 and Fair Employment Practices Commission, especially discrimination experiences of black workers. However, long-term effects such as migration out of the heavily segregated south and Civil Rights Movement precursors are also emphasized.

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" …

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

University of 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 …

Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the legal construction and development of racial difference as considered in literature written or set during the final years of American slavery. While there had consistently been a conceptual correspondence between black skin and enslavement, race or racial difference did not become the unqualified explanation of enslavement until fairly late in the institution’s history. Specifically, as slavery’s stability became increasingly threatened through the nineteenth century by abolitionism and racial slippage, race became the singular and explicit rationale for its existence and perpetuation. I argue that the primary discourse of this justificatory rationale was legal: through law race …

The "Real Black Power": Mattie Coney And The Pragmatic Politics Of Black Conservatism, Olivia M. Hagedorn

Open Access Theses

This project examines the life and activism of Mattie Rice Coney, a black civic leader from Indianapolis, Indiana. Coney founded the Citizens Forum, Inc., in July 1964 to facilitate the smooth implementation of recently enacted civil rights legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Indianapolis's Open Housing Ordinance. Employing a language of racial uplift and civic duty, Coney deftly crafted an image of black conservatism that appealed to moderate white conservatives. In articulating a "quiet," alternative civil rights agenda centered on individual improvement, Coney legitimized her sociopolitical status among whites as a respectable black leader. This status helped …

Tweeting Away Our Blues: An Interpretative Phenomenological Approach To Exploring Black Women's Use Of Social Media To Combat Misogynoir, Kelly Macias

Department of Conflict Resolution Studies Theses and Dissertations

In the age of social media, many Black women use online platforms and social networks as a means of connecting with other Black women and to share their experiences of social oppression and misogynoir, anti-Black misogyny. Examining the ways that Black women use technology as a tool to actively wage resistance to racial, gender and class oppression is critical for understanding their role in the human struggle for greater peace, beauty, freedom and justice. This study explored the experiences of 12 Black women in the United States and Britain who use social media for storytelling and testimony about their lives …

Parramore And The Interstate 4: A World Torn Asunder (1880-1980), Yuri K. Gama

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

The present project centers on how the African American community of Parramore in Orlando, Florida, became a low-income neighborhood. Based on a timeline from 1880 to 1980 and the construction of the Interstate 4, this thesis investigates Parramore’s decline grounded in the effects of urban sprawl and racial oppression. Among the effects that contributed to the neighborhood's decline in the postwar era were the closing of black schools and the migration of black residents to other places after the 1960s; the disruption of the neighborhood with the construction of highways and public housing; and the lack of investment in new …

"What, To A Prisoner, Is The Fourth Of July?": Mumia Abu-Jamal And Contemporary Narratives Of Slavery, Luis Omar Ceniceros

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Writing from a specifically Black postmodern perspective, former death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal composes his multimedia slave narrative as a postmodern Neo-slave narrative. From the Atlantic slave-trade to the United States prison-industrial complex, from Quobna Ottobah Cugoano to Mumia Abu-Jamal, the slave narrative exists as a critique against oppressive State powers and a collective affirmation of interiority and embodied significance. For Abu-Jamal, his incarceration is indicative of an ever-pervasive capitalist power-structure that in the past has, in the present is, and in the future will control designated groups of made marginalized masses in order that preeminent capitalist beneficiaries preserve elite …

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 …

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.

Constructing The World's Largest Prison: Understanding Identity By Examining Labor, Hubert J. Gibson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

A Civil War prison camp operated by the Confederacy known as Camp Lawton was once considered the largest prison in the world. This label was attributed to the fact that Lawton’s stockade enclosed 42 acres. The historical record does not have a clear picture of who built it. Newspaper interviews claim the construction was carried out by 500 impressed slave laborers and 300 Union POWs, but these lack the credibility of official orders. Unfortunately, many Confederate documents were lost when Sherman’s army came through Millen, GA. This study archaeologically examines construction techniques utilized for building stockades in an effort …

The Lexington, Kentucky Civil Rights Movement, Brandon J. Render

Online Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to describe the regional differences between the northern and southern civil rights movements through the examination of the black freedom struggle in Lexington, Kentucky. The geographical location of Lexington offers a unique perspective in civil rights movement activity, as the local movement was not distinctly northern or southern in character. This thesis functions as an analysis of northern and southern civil rights movement activity and uses a narrative of the Lexington movement to place the city's struggle in the context of each region. Oral interviews from white and black Lexingtonians that lived in the city before, during, …

Muckraking And C.O.B.Y (Cry Of Black Youth): Uncovering A History Of Organizing In Belle Glade, Raymond A. Hamilton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines a local activist group in the rural town of Belle Glade, Florida during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This research falls in line with many New Black Power studies. These New Black Power studies challenge existing notions of the Black Power and Civil Rights eras and their relationship to one another. It challenges the time frames, geography and ideology of both of the eras. This case study of a the group in Belle Glade is not the first to examine the similarities of the Black Power and Civil Rights eras, where many groups who affiliated with …

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 …