African American Studies Commons^™

Black Lives Matter: A Call To Action For Counseling Psychology Leaders, Candice Hargons, Della Mosley, Jameca Falconer, Reuben Faloughi, Anneliese Singh, Danelle Stevens-Watkins, Kevin Cokley

Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology Faculty Publications

Police brutality and widespread systemic racism represent historical and current sources of trauma in Black communities. Both the Black Lives Matter movement and counseling psychology propose to confront these realities at multiple levels. Black Lives Matter seeks to increase awareness about systemic racism and promote resilience among Black people. Counseling psychology states values of multiculturalism, social justice, and advocacy. Executive leadership in counseling psychology may seek to promote racial justice, yet struggle with how to participate in Black Lives Matter movements and address racial discrimination within larger systems spontaneously and consistently. However, counseling psychology trainees and professionals are actively involved …

Ball Is Life: Black Male Student-Athletes Narrate Their Division I Experiences, Eno Attah Meekins

LMU Theses and Dissertations

This study focused on the experiences of Black male student-athletes in Division I sports and used critical race methodology to present counter narratives. These narratives highlighted successes and heightened awareness about the needs and concerns of an extremely important, but often silenced, population. The purpose of this research was to examine the experiences of Black male student-athletes in the Division I revenue-generating sports of basketball and football. This study examined how Black males perceived the effectiveness of the NCAA supports in place for their academic success, degree attainment, and postcollegiate leadership and career opportunities. This dissertation also sought to understand …

The Hollow Class: African-American Class-Passing And The Popular, Whitney Martin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My project presses to include popular fiction, television, and film for serious critical consideration. To contextualize my research, I use theories that critically examine popular literature, connecting to the work of Janice Radway and Keenan Norris, and I study the African-American focus on class as explored by E. Franklin Frazier. In focusing on the popular, I highlight the everydayness of class and race anxieties. I build on Gwendolyn Foster’s work on class passing but stress racial intersections with identity performance. I rely on New Historicism and Critical Race Theory to substantiate my examination of the literature. I look at specific …

Our Future Leaders, Preston Love Jr.

Black Studies Faculty Publications

In January of 2015, I wrote “As you know the North Omaha Voter Participation Project (Voter Project) has been in the forefront of North Omaha’s voter participation for now nine (9) years, founded by Preston Love Jr. Recently Preston has written two very thought provoking articles relative to the voting problems in North Omaha (see the titles below). The Voter Project along with others, saw the upcoming release of the film 'Selma' as a great opportunity to highlight the history of voting rights and the importance of voting. Since one of our Voter Project goals is to engage young …

Historical Society Has Tools To Dig Deep, John M. Rudy

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

"On last Wednesday night, Lincoln's Birthday," the Star and Sentinel reported in 1908, "a colored lodge of Elks was instituted in Xavier Hall this place with 45 members." The Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World was originally formed as an African-American fraternal organization in the 1890s after a white elks lodge in Philadelphia denied local black men membership. By 1908, the organization was quickly working its way through Pennsylvania. And now Gettysburg had "Colored Elks," working as a social safety net for the black community of the Third Ward. They provided aid to the sick and the …

The Harlem Renaissance's Hidden Figure, Jada A. Grice

English and Creative Writing Summer Fellows

This project will seek to look at the Harlem Renaissance’s hidden figure, Jessie Fauset. Jessie Fauset was born to an A.M.E. minister and his wife as one of ten children in Camden County New Jersey and raised in Philadelphia. From there she got her college degree and began teaching all over the country. She has written four novels, There is Confusion, Plum Bun, The Chinaberry Tree, and Comedy: American Style, all of which I have read this summer. Each novel focuses on the early twentieth century black family. I will be analyzing these novels under the four themes of passing, …

Ua35/8 Reveille, Vol. 25, No. 2, Wku Veterans Upward Bound

WKU Administration Documents

Newsletter created by and about WKU Veternas Upward Bound.

• Rck Wright Awarded 2017 Kentucky Veterans of the Year's Male Distinguished Friend of Veterans Award
• Veterans Upward Bound 25th Anniversary Celebration
• Soldier for Life Center Seeks to Ease Soldiers' Transition
• Student Vets are Chaing High-paying Careers
• Ditch the Junk Food

Ua77/1 Wku Spirit, Wku Alumni Relations

WKU Administration Documents

WKU alumni magazine. Contents:

• Ransdell, Gary. Letter from the President
• 20 Things You Didn’t Know About Gary Ransdell
• Scholarship Celebration
• U.S. News & World Report Ranks WKU Online Programs Among Best in Nation
• Gary Ransdell to Become President & CEO of Semester at Sea
• Six WKU Students Awarded Gilman International Scholarships for Summer 2017
• WKU Tied for 2^nd in 2016-2017 List of Top Fulbright Producers
• Six WKU Faculty & Alumni Named 2017 Trailblazer Honorees
• University Distinguished Professor Gifts Proceeds from IRA to WKU
• Honors College at WKU Named for Dixie & Pete Mahurin
• Gabbi Doolin Memorial Scholarship
• Vic Richey …

Book Review - Slavery And Freedom In Savannah, Latiffany D. Davis

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Course Syllabus (Su17) Coli 331: “‘World-Traveling’: Alterity And Liminality In Spike Lee’S Do The Right Thing And Amiri Baraka’S Dutchman”, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

This semester, we’ll view Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing and Shirley Knight’s 1966 cinematic production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman through the critical lenses of Maria Lugones’ notions of ‘worlds’ and ‘world-traveling,’[1] which she develops in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Our task is to analyze a number of the problematics addressed in these visual works as discernible ‘world(s)’ of meaning and experience constituted by the libidinous investments, concrete practices, and ideological convictions of the human subjects who bear and circulate them.

[1] Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, …

Black Lives, Sacred Humanity, And The Racialization Of Nature, Or Why America Needs Religious Naturalism Today, Carol W. White

Faculty Journal Articles

Embedded in persistent representations of people of African descent as inferior beings or subpar humans are problematic notions of animality, race, and nature in the U.S., or a lethal combination of intimately conjoined white supremacy and species supremacy. Confronting these processes is a model of African American religious naturalism, which presupposes human animals’ deep, inextricable homology with each other and with other natural processes. Building on the ideas of Anna J. Cooper, W. E. B. du Bois, and James Baldwin, this model of religious naturalism emphasizes humans as sacred centers of value and distinct movements of nature itself where deep …

Protective Factors Against Peer And Social Media Sex Messages: The Moderating Role Of Parental Influences On African American Emerging Adult Students' Sexual Behaviors, Jacqueline Eunice Haywood

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

The most recent research on risky sexual behaviors is primarily based on adolescent, predominately White, or multiple race (e.g., African American and White) samples. There is a paucity of literature focused exclusively on African Americans, particularly African American emerging adults between the ages of 18 and 25. Given the increased risk for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) for college aged African Americans, it is important to understand factors that may decrease engaging in risky sexual behaviors that are specific to this group. The current study examined the roles of parental warmth and communication about sex as protective factors. Participants (n = …

When I See My Face: Painting The Portrait Of Black Women Leaders In The U.S. Federal Government, Antoinette Lavawn Allen

STEMPS Theses & Dissertations

Many Black women have chosen the federal government as their employer; a review of literature provides few studies on the Black women leaders in the federal government. Similarly, there is limited research about these women in academic settings. The purpose of this qualitative portraiture study is to explore the lived experiences of Black female leaders and the (a) challenges they face in leadership and (b) resilience strategies they use to overcome those challenges. The researcher used the portraiture methodology, which embraces traditional qualitative data sources, such as interviews and documents as well as creative expressions to include poetry, music, and …

Structural Racism: Racists Without Racism In Liberal Institutions Within Colorblind States, Alexis Nicole Mootoo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Afro-Descendants suffer sustained discrimination and invisibility that is proliferated with policies that were once blatantly racist, but are now furtive. This study argues that structural racism is alive and well in liberal institutions such as publicly funded colleges and universities. Thus, structural racism is subtly replicated and reproduced within these institutions and by institutional agents who are Racist without Racism. This study builds on theories from Pierre Bourdieu, Frantz Fanon, Glen Loury and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. The juxtaposition of their theoretical arguments provides a deeper insight into how structural racism becomes a de facto reflexive phenomenon in liberal and progressive institutions …

Eartha M. M. White Collection Container List, Thomas G. Carpenter Library Special Collections And University Archives

Finding Aids and Container Lists

Personal correspondence, documents, notes, memorabilia, printed materials and photographs. Notable materials include numerous photographs chronicling twentieth century black history in Jacksonville and historical photographs of urban Jacksonville. Included in the collection are the photographs of R. Lee Thomas, a black photographer active in the early twentieth century in the southern United States. Thomas' work covers primarily southern black religious and labor groups, circa 1946-49.

My Crown And Glory: Community, Identity, Culture, And Black Women’S Concerns Of Hair Product-Related Breast Cancer Risk, Dede K. Teteh, Susanne B. Montgomery, Sabine Monice, Laura Stiel, Phyllis Y. Clark, Eudora Mitchell

Health Sciences and Kinesiology Faculty Articles

Breast cancer (BC) incidence rates for Black and non-Hispanic White women have recently converged; however, Black women continue to die at higher rates from the disease. Black women also use hair products containing hormonally active chemicals at higher rates than other races and ethnic groups. Studies now link chemical components in hair and personal care products to breast cancer risk. Using a community-based participatory research approach, this qualitative study explored community concerns about the role of hair products on breast cancer risk. Focus groups and key informant interviews using triangulation to assure relevant perspectives (women with and without breast cancer …

“That’S Why I Say Stay In School”: Black Mothers’ Parental Involvement, Cultural Wealth, And Exclusion In Their Son’S Schooling, Quaylan Allen, Kimberly A. White-Smith

Education Faculty Articles and Research

This study examines parental involvement practices, the cultural wealth, and school experiences of poor and working-class mothers of Black boys. Drawing upon data from an ethnographic study, we examine qualitative interviews with four Black mothers. Using critical race theory and cultural wealth frameworks, we explore the mothers’ approaches to supporting their sons’ education. We also describe how the mothers and their sons experienced exclusion from the school, and how this exclusion limited the mothers’ involvement. We highlight their agency in making use of particular forms of cultural wealth in responding to the school’s failure of their sons.

Letters From North Omaha, Preston Love Jr.

Black Studies Faculty Publications

Dear Senator Ben Sasse,

Many voters in 2014 voted for your opponent Dave Domina, I was his deputy campaign manager. Once elected I expected that the communities and voters throughout Nebraska would be respected and their needs evaluated and some degree of dialogue. We are real, we are Nebraskans and have expectations of our elected officials. I am a resident and advocate for north Omaha. We have needs related to poverty, jobs, economic development, healthcare, home ownership, and more. To my knowledge there are no initiatives, no dialogue, nothing.

Additionally, it appears that there is no diversity on your senate …

African American Teacher Recruitment: A Case Study In Oregon, Deborah Miller Allen

Dissertations and Theses

The public school teacher population of the United States is predominantly White, while the demographics of P-12 student population continue to grow increasingly diverse. Across the nation, there has been a call for the recruitment and retention of culturally and linguistically diverse teachers. The state of Oregon passed the Oregon Educator Equity Act, originally called the Oregon Minority Teacher Act, in 1991, and with recent renewed attention, the preparation of more culturally and linguistically diverse teachers in the state has gained prominence. Refocused consideration to the lack of diversity in the teaching workforce is overdue, as evidenced by the low …

Notable Women Of Portland, Tracy J. Prince, Zadie Schaffer

Curriculum and Instruction Faculty Publications and Presentations

The story of Portland, Oregon, like much of history, has usually been told with a focus on male leaders. This book offers a reframing of Portland’s history--starting from 10,000 years of Native American women, to pioneer women, to women of the Progressive Era, WWI, WWII, post-war women, and chapters on Women in the Arts and Women in Politics. Many women made their mark and radically changed the Oregon frontier, including Native Americans Polly Johnson and Josette Nouette; pioneers Minerva Carter and Charlotte Terwilliger; doctors Marie Equi, Mary Priscilla Avery Sawtelle, and Bethina Owens-Adair; artists Eliza Barchus and Lily E. White; …

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …

Reimagining The Collective: Black Popular Music And Recording Studio Innovation, 1970-1990, Will Fulton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines developments in the production practices of black popular music in the recording studio from 1970 to 1990. The year 1970 marked a transition in the recording practice of popular music that had a distinct impact on styles marketed as R&B, soul, and funk. Multitracking in the 1950s and 1960s had paved the way for a transformed production process, one initiated by Les Paul’s and Sidney Bechet’s overdubbing experiments in the 1940s. The collective sound of instrumentalists and vocalists heard on records no longer resulted from live-to-tape recordings of group performances, but was increasingly the product of constructed …

Beyond The Vale: Visualizing Slavery In Craven County, North Carolina, Marissa N. Kinsey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Beyond the Vale is a data visualization project dedicated to the study of slavery in antebellum North Carolina. Focusing on Gooding’s Township, a rural farming community in the eastern county of Craven, it is designed to address basic questions about the experiences of the county’s antebellum enslaved population. These questions represent points of contention between local heritage narratives and the direct testimonies of former slaves. Where former slaves describe a complex, yet undeniably exploitative system in which they had only minimal control over their own lives, county literature echoes larger themes in North Carolina state scholarship by either overlooking slavery, …

Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …

Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The global fashion market is expanding every day, but often, the global fashion runways do not reflect that reality. On average, black models make up for six percent of models used on the runway during the fashion month calendar. This small percentage is also mirrored in advertisements and editorials featured in popular fashion magazines. In the 1970s, black models were met with great opportunities, and that success trickled down into the 1980s and the 1990s. As the 90s came to a close, top designers opted for an aesthetic that ultimately excluded models of color, but black models beared the brunt …

"Propaganda For Democracy": The Vexed History Of The Federal Theatre Project, Karen E. Gellen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My thesis explores and analyzes the Federal Theater Project’s cultural and political impact during the Depression, as well as the contested legacy of this unique experiment in government-sponsored, broadly accessible cultural expression. Part of the New Deal’s Works Projects Administration, the FTP aimed to provide jobs for playwrights, actors, designers, stagehands, and other theater professionals on relief in the stark period from 1935 to 1939. But the project became a nationwide political and artistic flashpoint, spurring fierce debate over the leadership, politics and impact of this “people’s theater.” The FTP gave professional theater an unprecedented reach into working-class and black …

The Legacy Of Slavery And The Continued Marginalization Of Communities Of Color Within The Legal System, Julia N. Alvarez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of this thesis paper is to demonstrate how the history of slavery in the United States continues to marginalize communities of color. The history of slavery in America was the result of various factors. Some of these factors included but were not limited to; economic, legal, and social. Slavery provided a reliable and self-reproducing workforce. The laws enacted during slavery ensured the continuation of the social order of the time. This social order was based on the generalized understanding that blacks were born into servitude. Those born into slavery were not given the same legal or economic status …

Buildings And Books: Segregated Libraries As Places For Community-Making, Interaction And Learning In The Age Of Jim Crow (Presentation For The Society For The History Of Authorship, Reading, And Publishing Annual Conference, June 2017), Matthew R. Griffis

Publications and Other Resources

From the conference program: "This presentation reviews the preliminary findings of a federally funded, 3-year historical study that explores how segregated Carnegie libraries were used as places of community-making, interaction, and learning for African Americans in the age of Jim Crow. Known then as "Carnegie Negro libraries," these public libraries opened in eight southern states between 1900 and 1925 and were an extension of the well-known library development program funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

"Drawing on archival sources, including newly completed oral history interviews with surviving library users, this presentation explores how these libraries helped foster a …

The Impact Of "Modern Sexism" On The 2016 Presidential Election, Angie Maxwell

Blair Center Poll

The latest analysis of data from 2016 Blair Center Poll explores how American attitudes about working women and feminism influenced the presidential race along racial, gender, regional and partisan lines.

Link to full report: https://blaircenter.uark.edu/the-impact-of-modern-sexism/

Fictive Kinship In The Aspirations, Agency, And (Im)Possible Selves Of The Black American Art Teacher, Gloria Wilson

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this paper, I explore the pairing of the concepts of fictive kinship and agency in order to explore racial identity narratives of the Black American art teacher. Expanding on the anthropological concept of fictive kinship, where bonds of connectedness between people help to shape selfhood, I consider the powerful impact that visual culture has on shaping identity narratives and the professional aspirations of Black American art teachers. I identify fictive kinship connections as salient in creating spaces which affect agency in the conceptualization and achievement of the self as an artist. I further use the concept of fictive kinship …