Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons^™

Recent Changes In The Structure And Value Of African-American Male Occupations, Jeremiah P. Cotton

Trotter Review

The occupational structure of black men has undergone major changes in recent years, shifting from largely blue-collar to white-collar and service occupations. At the same time there has been a decline in both the relative and absolute value of black male occupations. Moreover, it appears that labor-market discrimination still plays a significant role in the disparity between black and white male occupational earnings.

Back Matter: Trotter Review, Vol. 4, Issue 3

Trotter Review

Includes information about the Ph.D. Program in Gerontology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and about the Trotter Institute's six-volume series entitled The Assessment of the Status of African-Americans.

Sports Notes: Blacks And Private Golf Clubs, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

This past summer racial progress in the United States ran head first into the issue of "freedom of association" in the form of private clubs that prohibit membership to "other" folk, i.e., blacks and women. The specific issue in the case of the Shoal Creek Country Club of Alabama was the appropriateness of holding a Professional Golf Association (PGA) tournament at a club that did not accept blacks as members and was so bold as to say so to the press.

Stratification And Subordination: Change And Continuity In Race Relations, E. Yvonne Moss, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

One of the measures used to gauge progress made by African-Americans in gaining equal opportunity has been to compare and contrast the status of black Americans to that of white Americans using various social indices. Historically, the status of blacks relative to whites has been one of subordination; race has been a primary factor in determining social stratification and political status. Relations between white and black Americans were established during slavery and the Jim Crow era of segregation. In the infamous Dred Scott (1856) decison, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney articulated the fundamental nature of this system of racial …

In Appreciation Of Birago I. Diop: A Subtle Advocate Of Négritude, Winston E. Langley

Trotter Review

The closing weeks of the last decade brought with them the death of three distinguished world figures: Samuel Beckett, the Irish-French playwright, novelist, and poet; Andrei D. Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist, human rights advocate, and leader in the international disarmament movement; and Birago I. Diop, the Senegalese poet, storyteller, and statesman. In the case of the former two, leading U.S. newspapers and other media paid merited tribute in the amplest of proportions; in case of the last, however, it was as if he had either never lived or had gained no standing of importance worthy of much attention. Diop …

Media Images Of Boston's Black Community, Kirk A. Johnson

Trotter Review

In their efforts to report on the forces that affect Boston's racial climate, the local media have typically focused on the more obvious institutional actors: businesses, city hall, school boards, churches, the courts, neighborhood groups. Rarely have the media themselves been subjected to the same scrutiny. This study represents one such effort. It is an analysis of the images of Boston's black community that are conveyed through the local news media. It asks the question: If a Bostonian relied solely on the local news for information about local blacks, what impressions would he or she be left with, and how …

Reel Blacks: A Kinder, Gentler Fbi, Patricia A. Turner

Trotter Review

Revisionist interpretations of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) role in enforcing civil rights legislation and its monitoring of black activists have proliferated during the last decade. Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Racial Matters by Kenneth O'Reilly, and The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. by David Garrow are just a few of the numerous books to chronicle the FBI's somewhat embarrassing record on race-related issues. Given this wealth of documentation in print, it is even more startling that in the …

Tainted Glory: Truth And Fiction In Contemporary Hollywood, Patricia A. Turner

Trotter Review

In the earliest days of cinema, the image of the African American on screen matched the off-screen image. When a 12-minute version of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903) was filmed, "Tom" shows were the most popular stage shows, the Stowe novel was still a top-seller, and the notion that white southerners were the real victims of the peculiar institution was gaining increasing acceptance in academic circles. When D.W. Griffith's epic and revolutionary Birth of a Nation (1915) depicted a set of stock African-American movie characters — the subservient overweight domestic servant; the indifferent, coquettish mulatto; the savage, sexually driven buck; and …

Introduction, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

The mass media can be a positive or negative force in the struggle for racial progress. Unfortunately, the black community faces media that provide many negative influences. Consequently, there is a continuing need to address this issue.

In the articles in this issue of the Trotter Review we examine the current representation of blacks in the news media and representations of blacks in history through the entertainment media.

Consequences Of Racial Stereotyping, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

What are the consequences of negative portrayals of blacks? As mentioned in the previous articles, the media help to provide definitions of social reality, of social situations. Attendant upon such definitions is an implicit action orientation, a recommendation as to action appropriate to the situation.

The media are a significant factor in the ongoing battle for racial progress. While some of the battles take place in official forums (i.e., governmental institutions), other battles take place in unofficial forums such as newspapers, television, radio, movies, books, and magazines. These should not be taken lightly; there is ample evidence that individuals act …

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 …

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.

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

Scientific Racism: Persistence And Change, William Edwards

Trotter Review

In the United States, World War II was hailed as the “war to end all wars.” The war itself was considered a classic confrontation between the forces of liberal democracy and those of German fascism. Inherent in the ideology of nazism was Adolf Hitler’s “final solution,” the specter of rule by a nation committed to genocide. The Third Reich was dedicated to the proposition of “Aryan superiority.” The Allied Forces, dedicated to the principles of democracy and freedom (though there were inconsistencies between principle and practice), vigorously opposed the geopolitical intentions of Hitler’s regime and its pronounced policy of racial …

The National Congress Of Black Faculty, Ronald W. Walters

Trotter Review

In recent years serious problems have arisen in the field of black higher education that have not been subject to systematic examination and corrective programming. These problems have magnified the necessity for a vehicle through which black faculty might be mobilized to contribute to the enhance ment of their own professional opportunities and thus make a significant impact upon black higher education in general. Some of these problems are discussed below.

Commentary: The "Negro" Problem In The 1980s, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

Since 1984 the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Science has been conducting a study on the status of black Americans. And since 1986 the William Monroe Trotter Institute has been conducting a similar study. The Trotter Institute study was developed because we wanted to have the widest possible discussion of the present condition of blacks and the social policy implications of that condition.

Dynamics Of Minority Education: An Index To The Status Of Race And Ethnic Relations In The United States, James E. Blackwell

Trotter Review

Throughout this century scholars and legal experts have devoted special attention to the issue of race and ethnicity as a determinant of life chances in the United States. Some of the more influential treatises in the social and behavioral sciences, many of which have become classics, addressed fundamental, derivative (and often more compelling) extensions of race and ethnicity. They focused on such topics as race-based group dominance, ethnic stratification, structural inequality based upon racial or ethnic identification, beliefs in inherent racial superiority and status privilege, class exploitation, the nature of prejudice, and the maintenance of power over groups defined as …

Racial Insularity At The Core: Contemporary American Racial Attitudes, A. Wade Smith

Trotter Review

Survey research scientists have been interested in American racial attitudes ever since the craft has achieved a reasonable degree of precision. White attitudes toward blacks constitute the longest running topic in survey research. However, as a result of dramatic and systematic changes in racial attitudes and because of the changing nature of race relations per se, there may be less agreement now about the structure of American racial values than at any time since World War II. This paper will provide a capsule presentation of the major findings of recent research on racial attitudes and a brief summary of the …

Lead Poisoning: A Health Epidemic In The Black Community, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

Lead poisoning in humans has been identified as a cause of high blood pressure, heart disease, birth defects, complications in pregnancies and developmental problems in infants. It is a health problem of epidemic dimensions in the black community. This serious health problem is yet another example of the production of “illth” in the modern society. As the means of production create wealth for some sectors of society they also create illth.

George Alan Russell: Jazz's First Theorist, Robert E. Moore

Trotter Review

In 1953 George Alan Russell published The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. By virtue of this work Russell carved out a unique niche for himself in the history of jazz, his opus representing the first theoretical work to come out of the jazz tradition. The purpose of this paper is to define his place in jazz history and to offer a biographical sketch off jazz’s first and most important theorist. My points of departure will be references made to Russell in two widely read works—Gunther Schuller’s Early Jazz and Wilfrid Meliers’ Music in a New Found Land. …

Raising Up Our Memory, Byron Rushing

Trotter Review

There was a man named Carter G. Woodson; Carter G. Woodson was a historian. He taught school at a black college in Washington, D.C. — Howard University. He was concerned about the fact that when he went out to talk with young people — young black people in public schools in Washington, D.C. — none of the students could name a famous black person. He thought it was terrible that no young black people knew the names of famous black people; that they didn’t know the name of Frederick Douglass; that they didn’t know the names of black inventors; black …

Uncle Monroe, Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely

Trotter Review

Poem by Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely, the grandniece of William Monroe Trotter.