African American Studies Commons^™

"Listen To The Wild Discord": Jazz In The Chicago Defender And The Louisiana Weekly, 1925-1929, Sarah A. Waits

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This essay will use the views of two African American newspaper columnists, E. Belfield Spriggins of the Louisiana Weekly and Dave Peyton of the Chicago Defender, to argue that though New Orleans and Chicago both occupied a primary place in the history of jazz, in many ways jazz was initially met with ambivalence and suspicion. The struggle between the desire to highlight black achievement in music and the effort to adhere to tenets of middle class respectability play out in their columns. Despite historiographical writings to the contrary, these issues of the influence of jazz music on society were …

Freedom Indivisible: Gays And Lesbians In The African American Civil Rights Movement, Jared E. Leighton

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This work documents the role of sixty gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals in the African American civil rights movement in the pre-Stonewall era. It examines the extent of their involvement from the grassroots to the highest echelons of leadership. Because many lesbians and gays were not out during their time in the movement, and in some cases had not yet identified as lesbian or gay, this work also analyzes how the civil rights movement, and in a number of cases women’s liberation, contributed to their identity formation and coming out. This work also contributes to our understanding of opposition to …

Ua12/2/33 Whips & Chains, Wku Association For The Study Of African American Life & History

WKU Administration Documents

Invitation to first WKU Association for the Study of African American Life & History event entitled Whips & Chains.

Kara Walker: Harper's Pictorial History Of The Civil War (Annotated), Shannon Egan

Schmucker Art Catalogs

The preface to the original edition of Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, published in 1866 by Alfred H. Guernsey and Henry M. Alden asserts, “We proposed at the outset to narrate events just as they occurred; … to praise no man unduly because he strove for the right, to malign no man because he strove for the wrong." The suite of lithographs on display at Schmucker Art Gallery by prominent contemporary African-American artist Kara Walker entitled Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), on loan from the Middlebury College Museum of Art, challenges the truth Guernsey and …

New Negroes On Campus: St. Clair Drake And The Culture Of Education, Reform, And Rebellion At Hampton Institute, Andrew Rosa

History Faculty Publications

On March 15, 1925, Walter Scott Copeland, owner and editor of the Newport News Daily Press, charged that Hampton Institute was teaching and practicing “social equality between the white and negro races . . . The niggers in that institution,” he wrote, “were being taught that there ought not to be any distinction between themselves and white people.” His observation came from his wife, who was distraught after having seen a performance of the Denishawn Dancers while seated next to a black women in Hampton’s Ogden Hall only two weeks before.⁴ Based in Los Angeles and New York, the …

Ua3/1/2/2 President's Office-Cherry Correspondence - Special, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Special correspondence regarding Western Kentucky University. This series runs concurrently with the General Correspondence and there is no indication of what makes it special. Of special note is correspondence regarding the Student Army Training Corps, World War I veterans and construction of Cherry Hall. Incoming letters are mainly addressed to Henry Hardin Cherry. Responses are made by Cherry and occasionally by faculty and staff. The president's secretary Mattie McLean is the author of some of the letters signed by Cherry.

Talking Black And Sleeping White... Talking White And Sleeping Black: A Socio-Legal Examination Of Interracial Marriage In America, Kailey J. Schwallie

Senior Independent Study Theses

A historical socio-legal examination of interracial marriage and the transformation of the institution of marriage in the United States from 1883 to 1967. Focuses on miscegenation legislation, the social and legal reasons behind bans on interracial marriage, and the progressive liberalization of society and concurrent legal changes, which resulted in an overturning of the legal prohibitions on interracial marriage. This thesis presents a close examination of three critical Supreme Court cases in regard to interracial marriage, and the social climate of American race relations at the time of each case. There is also a comparison drawn between the historical debate …

Slaves To Contradictions: 13 Myths That Sustained Slavery, Wilson Huhn

Akron Law Faculty Publications

People have a fundamental need to think of themselves as “good people.” To achieve this we tell each other stories – we create myths – about ourselves and our society. These myths may be true or they may be false. The more discordant a myth is with reality, the more difficult it is to convince people to embrace it. In such cases to sustain the illusion of truth it may be necessary to develop an entire mythology – an integrated web of mutually supporting stories. This paper explores the system of myths that sustained the institution of slavery in the …

Supporting Caste: The Origins Of Racism In Colonial Virginia, Patrick D. Anderson

Grand Valley Journal of History

In 17th century Virginia, lower class whites and blacks coordinated on multiple occasions to resist the power of the ruling class elites. By the late 19th century, white laborers viewed the newly freed slaves through racist precepts and the two groups clashed on a regular basis. The aim of this essay is to explain how the shift from racial solidarity to racial antagonism occurred. Racist ideology originated in the minds of the elites and they attempted to separate the restless lower class along racial lines, first, by legal reforms, second, by creating a separate class of enslaved blacks. Anti-black racism …

Aa Ms 06 Home Is Where I Make It - Oral History Collection Finding Aid, Marieke Van Der Steenhoven

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

This oral history project was directed by Dr. Maureen Elgersman Lee, of USM, and Rachel Talbot Ross. The interviews were conducted by local high school students. The Collection includes transcripts, photographs and audiotapes from the two phases of the project, which documented African American life in the Greater Portland and Lewiston-Auburn areas.

Date Range:

2001-2003

Size of Collection:

1 ft.

Attica State Correctional Facility: The Causes And Fallout Of The Riot Of 1971, Kathleen E. Slade

The Exposition

Everyone has heard the rallying cry “Attica! Attica!” These are words shouted in protest by many in the 1970s including John Lennon in his song “Attica State” in 1971 and Al Pacino in the movie “Dog day Afternoon” in 1975. But what happened at Attica State Correctional Facility in the rural town of Attica, NY in 1971 to cause the bloodiest day in American history up to that time? A prison built to be escape proof and virtually riot proof in 1931 exploded just forty years later in a violent four day riot that ended in a bloody massacre of …

How Is The Most Segregated City In The Country Addressing Disproportionate Minority Contact With A Juvenile Burglary Restorative Justice Program And What Implications Exist For Community Based Restorative Circles? : Conflict Analysis And Recommendations, Lauren Thrift

Capstone Collection

Milwaukee, Wisconsin is considered the most segregated city in the country and has the most disproportionate rate of minorities in Wisconsin’s juvenile justice system. The State of Wisconsin recognizes disproportionate minority contact (DMC) is a product of both differential offending by minorities and the racist differential processing by the juvenile justice system. Milwaukee’s residents are locked in a conflict about the role of racism in the high rates of minority crime and whether to address DMC with more stringent punishment or increasing alternatives to incarceration. The entrenched segregation between African American and Caucasian neighborhoods and social groups reinforces polarization, increasing …

To Make A Better World Tomorrow: St. Clair Drake And The Quakers Of Pendle Hill, Andrew Rosa

History Faculty Publications

This article is part of a larger project by the author to record St. Clair Drake’s contribution to the black radical tradition. Here he examines Drake’s involvement with the Quakers in the early years of the Depression. Drawing on writings in African American and Popular Front periodicals of the time, it considers how a Quaker community shaped Drake’s identity as an intellectual activist and how his encounter suggests the ways in which black intellectuals engaged with non-violence as a philosophy and strategy for social change before he civil rights movement. Drake’s participation in non-violent campaigns for workers’ rights, world peace …

Remember The Fillmore: The Lingering History Of Urban Renewal In Black San Francisco, Christina Jackson, Nikki Jones

Africana Studies Faculty Publications

In the summer of 2008, I moved to San Francisco, California. I lived in the city for three months. As a researcher, my objective was to learn more about Mayor Gavin Newsome’s African-American Out-Migration Task Force. The Task Force convened in 2007 and met eight times from August to December. In 2009, the Mayor's office released a final report on the Redevelopment Agency's website that summarized the history of blacks in the city and outlined several recommendations for reversing their flight. The final report found that the political, economic, and social conditions of African-Americans are disproportionately more dire than any …

The Roots And Routes Of "Imperium In Imperio": St. Clair Drake, The Formative Years, Andrew Rosa

History Faculty Publications

Marking the centenary of St. Clair Drake's birth, this examination begins the project of recovering one of the most underrated minds of the twentieth century by situating him within the community(s) that initially served to form him. Illustrative of the social theory of a black community outlined in Black Metropolis, Drake's lineage and formative years suggests that his was a cultural identity rooted in and routed through a series of racially constructed, semi-autonomous black life worlds, each held together by the collective desires of those made most vulnerable by the upheavals of capitalism and the caste-enforcing structures of segregation …

Study Guide For United In Anger: A History Of Act Up, Matt Brim

Open Educational Resources

The United in Anger Study Guide facilitates classroom and activist engagement with Jim Hubbard’s 2012 documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. The Study Guide contains discussion sections, projects and exercises, and resources for further research about the activism of the New York chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The Study Guide is a free, interactive, multimedia resource for understanding the legacy of ACT UP, the film’s role in preserving that legacy, and its meaning for viewers' lives.

First Step Toward Freedom: Women In Contraband Camps In And Around The District Of Columbia During The Civil War, Lauren H. Roedner

Student Publications

A white Quaker abolitionist woman from Rochester, New York was not a likely sight in occupied Alexandria, Virginia during the Civil War where violence, suffering, death and racial inequality were rampant just south of the nation’s capital. Julia Wilbur was used to a comfortable home, her loving family, an enjoyable profession as a teacher, and the familiar comfort of many, often like-minded, friends. However instead of continuing that “easy” life, Julia embarked on a great adventure as a missionary to work with “contrabands-of-war”. More commonly known as fugitive slaves, these refugees needed shelter, medicine, food, clothes, and many other necessities …

"Spectacular Opacities": The Hyers Sisters' Performances Of Respectability And Resistance, Jocelyn Buckner

Theatre Faculty Articles and Research

This essay analyzes the Hyers Sisters, a Reconstruction-era African American sister act, and their radical efforts to transcend social limits of gender, class, and race in their early concert careers and three major productions, Out of Bondage and Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad, two slavery-to-freedom epics, and Urlina, the African Princess, the first known African American play set in Africa. At a time when serious, realistic roles and romantic plotlines featuring black actors were nearly nonexistent due to the country’s appetite for stereotypical caricatures, the Hyers Sisters used gender passing to perform opposite one another as heterosexual lovers in …

Locks And Cash: Whose Black History? (Part 2), John M. Rudy

Interpreting the Civil War: Connecting the Civil War to the American Public

A few weeks ago, the Hanover Evening Sun ran an article on the Lincoln Cemetery in Gettysburg and the locks which hang on its gates. This is by no means a new item of interest. The locks have girded the gates of the cemetery for three years. Still, the article (no longer on the Evening Sun's website but archived here in a PDF) raises a few interesting questions about the delicate balance between preservation and interpretation. [excerpt]

Locks And Cash: Whose Black History? (Part 1), John M. Rudy

Interpreting the Civil War: Connecting the Civil War to the American Public

The African-American Civil War Memorial has been a favorite site of mine in DC (and not simply because it's just down the block from the District's best restaurant, Ben's Chili Bowl). It is a monument in the right setting. Instead of being on the mall with the rest of the other monuments, to be easily overlooked like the DC World War I memorial or similar sidelights to the big three of Lincoln, Washington and Vietnam, the African American Civil War Memorial is in a community that can be moved by it. [excerpt]

‘Unkle Sommerset's’ Freedom: Liberty In England For Black Sailors, Charles R. Foy

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

With his 1772 decree in Somerset v. Steuart that slavery was ‘so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it [in England] but positive law’, Lord Mansfield altered the legal landscape regarding black rights in England. While earlier judicial decisions had implied that slaves who came to England were free, prior to the Somerset decision there was no judicial consensus on the issue. The Somerset decision did not decree that slavery was illegal in England. Yet many blacks believed it ‘emancipated’ any slave who reached the shores of England. This understanding, combined with the British military welcoming runaways into …

Community Control: Civil Rights Resistance In The Mile High City, Summer Burke

Psi Sigma Siren

Black power in the late 1960s was once blamed for the fall of the civil rights movement. The more militant and abrasive black power approach was mistaken for the alternative civil rights movement, contradictory to the progressive approach of nonviolent marches in the South. However, recent scholarship contextualizing black power and the Black Panthers in particular, restructured this paradigm. This move toward a more inclusive approach to studying black resistance across the country steered The Movement out of the Memphis to Montgomery narrative, and instead provides a more textured understanding of black radicalism as a vital aspect of civil rights …

Migration, Community, And Stereotype: Shaping Racial Space In The Twentieth-Century Urban West, Stefani Evans

Psi Sigma Siren

African Americans who migrated to western cities in the twentieth century encountered a polyglot mix of Euro Americans, Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans. Diverse western populations dictated that western racial contests over space and power would evolve differently from those in the North or the South. This paper examines the discourse on white, Latino and African American racial landscapes in western cities through themes of migration, community formation, and white stereotypes and community responses to those stereotypes in seven key monographs and two articles published between 1993 and 2005.

The Angel And The Imp: The Duncan Sisters’ Performances Of Race And Gender, Jocelyn Buckner

Theatre Faculty Articles and Research

From 1923 to 1959 Vivian and Rosetta Duncan performed the show Topsy and Eva in front of thousands of audiences in the United States and abroad. This essay examines how the Duncan Sisters’ appropriation of blackness through a yin and yang performance of black and white womanhood, their sexualized but ultimately infantilizing routine as young girls, and their take on anarchistic comedy resulted in a particular spin on age, gender, race, and sexuality that reinforced their privilege as white women even while it pushed the boundaries of acceptable femininity in the swiftly shifting American culture of the first half of …

Ua1b1/5 Martin Luther King Forum, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records regarding the Martin Luther King Forum.

Multiform Segregation In The Context Of The Urban Crises In Las Vegas And Los Angeles, 1930 - 1980, Colin M. Fitzgerald

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Multiform segregation in the context of the urban crises was a complex socio-historical phenomenon. The primary focus of this study addresses racial segregation in at least three basic societal areas: housing, employment, and education. Through the spatial separation of multiple ethnoracial groups such as African Americans and Mexican Americans, multiform segregation precipitated the urban crises. In the 50-year period this study covers, Las Vegas and Los Angeles sustained a two-tiered class system according to the prevailing racial attitudes of each city's business elite. As a resort city, Las Vegas could not endure ethnoracial tensions while Los Angeles' industrial base provided …

Colonel Utley's Emancipation - Or, How Lincoln Offered To Buy A Slave, Jerrica A. Giles, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The reputation of Abraham Lincoln has see-sawed over the last half-century on the fulcrum of race, and the results have not been happy for that reputation. As Gerald Prokopowicz has written, "the big question" about Lincoln and slavery runs today like this: "Was Lincoln really the Great Emancipator that we have traditionally been brought up to admire, or was he just a clever, lying, racist, white male politician who had no interest in the well-being of black America other than when it served his political interests?" No longer is it necessary, as one historian has wryly remarked, for politicians to …

The Features Of The Voice Of African American Tradition: An Analysis Of African American Rhetoric For The Influence Of The Call Response Technique, Laura Venezia

Communication Studies

This project explicates the nature of the rhetorical strategies, especially the call response, used by various African American artists and orators (Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and Public Enemy). The techniques include the interplay of repetition and heightening emotion provided especially through 1. using the “call response” directly, 2. announcing jeremiad warnings and rallying cries, and 3. using potent images to arouse emotions—the objective correlative.

Aa Ms 05 Cummings Guest House Register Finding Aid, Karin A. France

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

The Cummings family of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, ran a guest house from 1923 until 1993. Register in which guests signed themselves in or were signed in by staff at the Cummings Guest House, 110 Portland Ave., Old Orchard Beach, Maine. Includes signatures of family members who attended reunions after the Guest House ceased operation.

Date Range:

1923-1998

Size of Collection:

1 ft.

Interview With Helen Shiller, Jacob Martin Lingan

Chicago Anti-Apartheid Movement

Length: 50 minutes

Oral history interview of Helen Shiller by Jacob Martin Lingan

Ms. Shiller first outlines the path that led her to forming the Anti-Apartheid Ordinance, beginning with her work with the Minister of Information for ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) and a trip to Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa, which led to her interest in the latter. She recalls how, when she returned to Chicago, she was motivated to strengthen legislation against the Apartheid government. She describes the process they went through to force Chicago banks to divest from South Africa, which happened to coincide with Nelson Mandela’s …