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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
Safekeeping: Slavery, Capitalism, And The Carceral State In Washington, D.C., 1830-1863, Brandon Wilson
Safekeeping: Slavery, Capitalism, And The Carceral State In Washington, D.C., 1830-1863, Brandon Wilson
Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations
By the 1830s, incarceration emerged as a two-pronged solution for racial control and economic expansion. Local and federal government built jails around the District of Columbia to detain "rowdy negro boys," men, and women, as a means to stymie their rapid movement and fuel a burgeoning domestic slave trade. People were jailed, fined, and often sold to the Deep South, providing a wellspring of capital for enslavers, justified through the lens of criminality. For the crime of petty theft, missing free papers, or in at least one case "using foul language," black people of the Washington region could find themselves …
Black Delilahs: Black Female Sexuality And Resistance In Progressive Era New York City, Kayla J. Smith
Black Delilahs: Black Female Sexuality And Resistance In Progressive Era New York City, Kayla J. Smith
Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses
Black Delilahs traces a history of policing and criminalizing of black women’s sexuality in Progressive Era New York City. By analyzing vaudeville posters, joke books, blues music, newspapers, vice committee records, and reformatory records, this project provides a historiography of respectability politics and the sociocultural norms and practices that limited American society’s freedom of sexual expression. It subsequently explores how working-class black women engaged with commercial, public, and private urban spaces normatively associated with vice, deviancy, and disreputability in ways that subverted these expectations of respectability and empowered them. These women used creative ways to express their sexuality within the …