African American Studies Commons^™

Entwined Threads Of Red And Black: The Hidden History Of Indigenous Enslavement In Louisiana, 1699-1824, Leila K. Blackbird

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Contrary to nationalist teleologies, the enslavement of Native Americans was not a small and isolated practice in the territories that now comprise the United States. This thesis is a case study of its history in Louisiana from European contact through the Early American Period, utilizing French Superior Council and Spanish judicial records, Louisiana Supreme Court case files, statistical analysis of slave records, and the synthesis and reinterpretation of existing scholarship. This paper primarily argues that it was through anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity and with the utilization of socially constructed racial designations that “Indianness” was controlled and exploited, and that Native Americans …

“Your Love Is Too Thick”: An Analysis Of Black Motherhood In Slave Narratives, Neo-Slave Narratives, And Our Contemporary Moment, Kaitlyn M. Spong

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, Kait Spong examines alternative practices of mothering that are strategic nature, heavily analyzing Patricia Hill Collins’ concepts of “othermothering” and “preservative love” as applied to Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved and Harriet Jacob’s 1861 slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Using literary analysis as a vehicle, Spong then applies these West African notions of motherhood to a modern context by evaluating contemporary social movements such as Black Lives Matter where black mothers have played a prominent role in making public statements against systemic issues such as police brutality, heightened surveillance, and the …

The Challenges Faced By The Freedmen’S Bureau Agents Of Deep East Texas, Jacy D. King

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The years following the Civil War proved to be tumultuous for the nation and caused great social and economic upheaval in the South. Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in 1865 to provide a smoother transition in former Confederate states and to guard the liberties of the former bondsmen. The agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Deep East Texas faced the same challenges and hardships as their counterparts in other areas of the state and throughout the South. Numerous historians have written on Reconstruction and the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas, but in a broader sense.

This …

Irish Whips And German Suplexes: Professional Wrestling And The American Immigrant And Minority Experience, Colin Rush Walker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Trends within sports and popular entertainment have long been regarded as great indicators of larger transitions in the social, political, and economic landscape of the United States. Repeatedly mined and often used for context, sports have become intrinsically linked to the broader discussions of people, their beliefs, ideals, and actions occurring in the historiography of American culture. However, one sport has regularly been passed over in these examinations. I argue that the modern day entertainment monolith of professional wrestling serves as one of the most important indicators of socioeconomic change in the history of the U.S., and that it plays …

Responding To Change: Girl Scouts, Race, And The Feminist Movement, Phyllis E. Reske

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America (GSUSA) is to teach girls to be giving, self-sufficient, and independent in their homes and communities through volunteer work and earning merit badges. Open to all girls since its inception, the GSUSA offers Girl Scouts training in both gender-conforming and nontraditional vocations. However, during the first half of the twentieth century, segregation and domesticity was emphasized in American society. The organization began to focus less on careers, independence, and racial inclusion to preparing predominately white girls to be good wives and mothers. As Black Power and women’s liberation …

Ua12/2/1 College Heights Herald, Vol. 94, No. 12, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Archives Records

WKU campus newspaper reporting campus, athletic and Bowling Green, Kentucky news. This issue contains articles:

• Heicelbech, Evan & Rebeckah Alvey. Molded – Dormitories
• DeLetter, Emily & Nicole Ziege. 348 Minton Hall Residents Spend Weekend Relocating
• DeLetter, Emily. WKU to Continue Saudi Scholarship Between Countries
• DeLetter, Emily. ROTC Celebrates 100 Years at WKU, Honors Veterans
• Non-Binary: Proposal Disregards Science, Harms Non-binary Rights
• Allen, Ellie. Editorial Cartoon re: Gender Does Not Equal Sex
• Hanks, Michelle. Teaching Diversity
• Sisler, Julie. Review: Hair and the Call to Freedom & Expression – Theatre & Dance
• Holland, Kelley. In Formation – Marching Band
• Bryant, Maxis. Fresh …

A Tangled Web: Quakers And The Atlantic Slave System 1625 – 1770., Kate Freedman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation re-contextualizes the Quakers’ history as anti-slavery pioneers by exploring the crucial economic role that the slave-based economies of the British West Indies played in establishing the Quakers as a powerful sect in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Atlantic world. Quakers were driven by their faith to foster a spirit of equality inside and outside of their meetings. They were among the first European religious sects to allow women to preach, to oppose violence and war, and, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth-century, to ban the practice of enslaving other human beings within their membership. Yet the Quakers …

"The Whole Nation Will Move": Grassroots Organizing In Harlem And The Advent Of The Long, Hot Summers, Peter Blackmer

Doctoral Dissertations

“The Whole Nation Will Move” provides a narrative history of grassroots struggles for African American equality and empowerment in Harlem in the decade immediately preceding the era of widespread urban rebellions in the United States. Through a street-level examination of the political education and activism of grassroots organizers, the dissertation analyzes how local people developed a collective radical consciousness and organized to confront and dismantle institutional racism in New York City from 1954-1964. This work also explores how the interests and activities of poor and working-class Black and Puerto Rican residents of Harlem fueled the escalation of protest activity and …

The Privilege Of Blackness: Black Empowerment And The Fight For Liberation In Attala County, Mississippi 1865-1915, Evan Ashford

Doctoral Dissertations

Post-Civil War historiography paid minimal attention to the rural Afro-American impact on Southern social, economic, and political institutions prior to the 20^th century. This dissertation addresses this deficit. The Privilege of Blackness: Black Empowerment and the Fight for Liberation examines how Afro-Americans in rural Mississippi empowered themselves via their mentality, interracial interactions, landownership, labor diversification, education and suffrage as a means to fight for individual and racial liberation. The Privilege of Blackness: Black Empowerment and the Fight for Liberation in Attala County, Mississippi 1865-1915 makes the claim that freedom grounded Afro-American peoples claim to their inalienable rights guaranteed by …

Separate Places, Shared Spaces: Segregated Carnegie Libraries As Community Institutions In The Age Of Jim Crow (Presentation For The Southern History Association Annual Meeting, November 2018), Matthew R. Griffis

Publications and Other Resources

From the conference program: "This presentation explores how segregated Carnegie libraries in the south served as places of interaction, learning, and community-making for African Americans in the days of Jim Crow. Known then as “colored Carnegie libraries,” these institutions opened in eight southern states between 1904 and 1924 and were funded by Andrew Carnegie’s library development program of the early twentieth century. Some segregated Carnegie libraries operated for as many as six decades until, by the 1970s, most had been desegregated or permanently closed.

"Based on archival methods as well as newly completed oral history interviews, this presentation begins with …

The Significance Of John S. Mbiti's Works In The Study Of Pan-African Literature, Babacar Mbaye

Babacar Mbaye

No abstract provided.

The Slave Trade Route: A Regional And Local Development Catalyst, Chukwunyere Ugochukwu

Geography and Planning Faculty Publications

The conservation of and focus on slave export points turned tourist monuments in Cape Coast and Elmina, Ghana, are incomplete without linkages to other complicit places in the interior that together completes the chain of darkness, the trade in humans along the Atlantic coast of Ghana, as well as in the interior. Completed, it will highlight the infrastructure of the slave business, the domestic, as well as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. When the chain (route) of the different complicit communities in the interior to these export monuments along the Atlantic coast is conserved, it shall herald a completeness to the …

Ua19/16/1 2018-19 Wku Track & Field Cross Country Record Book, Wku Athletic Media Relations

WKU Archives Records

WKU track and field media guide for 2018-19 season.

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …

African Americans In Wv Oral History Project Flyer, Kelli Johnson

Ephemera

Flyer for oral history project for African American's in WV

Toward Culturally Competent Archival (Re)Description Of Marginalized Histories, Annie Tang, Dorothy Berry, Kelly Bolding, Rachel E. Winston

Library Presentations, Posters, and Audiovisual Materials

Influenced by the radical archives movement, panelists discuss their (re)processing projects for which they wrote or rewrote descriptions in culturally competent approaches. Their case studies include materials regarding underrepresented peoples and historically oppressed groups who are marginalized from or maligned in the archival record. Targeted to processors, this session aims to teach participants to apply their cultural competencies in writing finding aids through an introduction to cultural competency framework, the case study examples, and a short audience-participation exercise.

Guest Editors' Introduction To The Special Issue, Diversity In Aquatics, Angela K. Beale-Tawfeeq, Steven N. Waller Ph.D., Austin Anderson

International Journal of Aquatic Research and Education

This is the introductory editorial leading off the special issue, "Diversity in Aquatics."

Parting The Waters Of Bondage: African Americans’ Aquatic Heritage, Kevin Dawson

International Journal of Aquatic Research and Education

Since the 1960s, when the United States Center for Disease Control began compiling racial statistics on drowning death rates, it has been painfully obvious that African Americans are far more likely to drown than their white counterparts. While segregation denied black people access to most public swimming pools and racial violence transformed natural waterways into undesirable places for swimming a leisure, perceptions that swimming as an “un-black” or “white” pursuit have marginalized its acceptability within African American communities. “Parting the Waters of Bondage” is an original article based on decades of the author’s historical scholarship. It seeks to reduce the …

Will To Remember: Counter-Archives In The Work Of Alvarez, Danticat, And Díaz, Megan Elizabeth Feifer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues the essays, fiction, non-fiction, and non-profit work of authors Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, and Junot Díaz produce counter-narratives that when assembled, create a counter-archive of the Rafael Leonidas Trujillo dictatorship and its lasting effects. To support this claim, I analyze the various genres and medias they employ throughout the late 20^thand early 21^st centuries as redressing not only the “official” state history of the dictatorship, but also the overarching construction of history with a capital “H”. Through a close reading of form and the thematic concerns present in their work, I demonstrate how they …

Carolyn Nix, Mijour Jones

Oral Histories

Oral History of Carolyn Nix interviewed by Mijour Jones in Huntington, West Virginia

Shirley Williams, Markayla Moore

Oral Histories

Oral History of Shirley Williams, interviewed by Markayla Moore in Huntington, West Virginia.

Joe Williams, Markayla Moore

Oral Histories

Oral History of Joe Williams, interviewed by Markayla Moore in Huntington, West Virginia.

Gina Johnson, Shyah Johnson

Oral Histories

Oral History of Gina Johnson, interviewed by Shylah Johnson in Huntington, West Virginia.

Carl Woolfolk, T'Rayah Paschall

Oral Histories

Oral History of Carl Woolfolk, interviewed by his granddaughter T'Rayah Paschall in Huntington, West Virginia.

Janella Coleman, Denise Wattie

Oral Histories

Oral History of Janella Coleman, interviewed by Denise Wattie in Huntington, West Virginia.

Rev. Reginald Hill, Raiven Scott

Oral Histories

Oral History of Rev. Reginald Hill of the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Huntington, West Virginia

Doris Atkinson, Ariana Redding

Oral Histories

Oral History of Doris Atkinson interviewed by Ariana Redding in Huntington, West Virginia.

2018-07-16 Oral History With Myrtle Ross, Matthew R. Griffis

Oral History Archive

Myrtle Jackson Ross was born in 1929 in Austin County, Texas, where her father worked as a cotton-picker. When she was about eight years-old, Ross’s family moved to Houston, settling on Mason Street in the city’s Fourth Ward. There, her father worked at a hospital and her mother worked as a homemaker. Ross graduated from the Gregory School on Victor Street before attending Booker T. Washington High School on West Dallas Street.

Ross was in high school when she began visiting Houston’s Colored Carnegie Library, which was situated directly behind Booker T. Washington High School. For Ross, the library served …

[Review Of] Karolyn Smardz Frost And Veta Smith Tucker, Eds., A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, And The Underground Railroad In The Detroit River Borderland. Detroit, Mi: Wayne State University Press, 2016. Pp. 286. $34.99 (Paper)., Vanessa Holden

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

2018-06-02 Oral History With Willie Hartwell, Matthew R. Griffis

Oral History Archive

Willie Hartwell was born in 1942 Glenn, Texas and grew up in Houston, where she lived on Andrews Street in the city’s Fourth Ward. There, she graduated from the Gregory School before attending Booker T. Washington High School. Later moving to the Third Ward with her mother, Hartwell attended Miller Junior and Yates (now Jack Yates) Senior high schools.

Hartwell was about seven years-old when she and her younger brother happened upon the segregated Carnegie Branch library one afternoon on Frederick Street. Neither had visited a public library before. Located about seven city blocks from her home, the Carnegie Branch …