African American Studies Commons^™

“Something Large And Old Awoke”: Ecopoetics And Compassion In Tracy K. Smith’S Wade In The Water, Kaitlin Hoelzer

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Susa Young Gates Award Essay

First Place

Both historical and contemporary Black poets have used their work to identify, condemn, and suggest solutions to problems stemming from racism in American society. Indeed, as Arnold Rampersad notes in his introduction to The Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry, many Black poets use “poetry as a vehicle of protest against social injustice in America.” Art is inherently political, even when its arguments do not overtly engage in political debates. As Lorraine Hansberry argues, all art is rooted in a particular social and political consciousness. The choice is “not whether one will …

Texas 'Our' Texas: My Family's Deep Roots In The Lone Star State, Karen Kossie-Chernyshev

Department of History, Geography and General Studies

No abstract provided.

"Texas, "Our" Texas: My Family's Deep Roots In The Lone Star State", Karen Kossie-Chernyshev

Department of History, Geography and General Studies

In this essay, Karen Kossie-Chernyshev traces her family's connections to Texas history, from Mexican Texas history to the present.

Bristol And Newport And The Transatlantic Slave Trade 09-01-2022, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

"Prophecies Of Loss": Debating Slave Flight During Virginia's Secession Crisis, Evan Turiano

Publications and Research

This article examines debates over fugitives from slavery during Virginia’s secession movement. By considering these debates in the context of Virginia’s history of freedom seekers, the constitutional politics of fugitive slave rendition, and white fears of politically informed slave resistance, this article clarifies how proslavery Virginians understood the threat posed by interstate slave flight in 1861. In the wake of Abraham Lincoln's election, proslavery Virginians on both sides of the secession conflict agreed that runaways posed a grave danger to the future of slavery in the state. Early in the convention, southeastern planters and northwestern unionists forged an alliance based …

Centers Of Community: A Spatial Analysis Of The Mid-19th Century Populaton Residing On Beacon Hill, Boston, Ma, Justin Malcolm

Graduate Masters Theses

The first Black church constructed in Boston, and the oldest extant Black church building in America, the African Meeting House was located on the North Slope of Beacon Hill; the predominant residence of Boston’s Black population during the nineteenth century. The African Meeting House has been the subject of several important archaeological investigations. In 1840, a schism within the African Meeting House congregation resulted in the establishment of the Twelfth Baptist Church. Historical contexts suggest that this neighborhood was highly segregated. A geographic and statistical analysis of the unique 1850 Boston City Census, which was made to yield spatial contexts …

Daley, Joy Elaine, Mark Naison

Oral Histories

No abstract provided.

Thank You Governor Abbott! Sending Nyc Busloads Of Migrants Helps Strengthen Our City's Economy, Mark Naison

Occasional Essays

No abstract provided.

The Papers Of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume Vi : The Struggle To Pass The 1960 Civil Rights Act, 1959–1960, Clarence Mitchell Jr., Denton L. Watson

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 aimed to close loopholes in its 1957 predecessor that had allowed continued voter disenfranchisement for African Americans and for Mexicans in Texas.

In early 1959, the newly seated Eighty-Sixth Congress had four major civil rights bills under consideration. Eventually consolidated into the 1960 Civil Rights Act, their purpose was to correct the weaknesses in the 1957 law. Mitchell’s papers from 1959 to 1960 show the extent to which congressional resistance to the passage of meaningful civil rights laws contributed to the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and to subsequent demonstrations. The papers …

Why Environmental Racism In The Bronx May Be A More Pressing Issue Than Gentrification, Mark Naison

Occasional Essays

No abstract provided.

The Papers Of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume V : The Struggle To Pass The 1957 Civil Rights Act, 1955–1958, Clarence Mitchell Jr., Denton L. Watson

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Volume V of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. records the successful effort to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act: the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875.

Prior to the US Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the NAACP had faced an impenetrable wall of opposition from southerners in Congress. Basing their assertions on the court’s 1896 “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, legislators from the South maintained that their Jim Crow system was nondiscriminatory and thus constitutional. In their view, further civil rights laws were unnecessary. In ruling that legally mandated …

Through The Heart Of The City: Interstates And Black Geographies In Urban America, Airic Hughes

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Federal urban renewal projects changed the landscape of numerous American cities throughoutthe twentieth century. Many of these projects worked cohesively in tandem with discriminatory urban planning policies such as redlining. The conclusions of this project demonstrate how U.S. Interstate 630 (I-630) intentionally re-segregated Arkansas' capital city, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 national desegregation order and the infamous desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. I further contend that I-630 was constructed using the racialized language and tactics of urban renewal and was fundamental to improving Little Rock’s national reputation by purging the city's social memory and legacy …

Review Of Undoing The Knots: Five Generations Of American Catholic Anti-Blackness, Peter R. Gathje

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

Review Of Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism, Charles Whitmer Wright

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

Review Of How To Be An Antiracist (An African’S View), Joseph L. Mbele

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

Film Review: Summer Of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Cameron Smith

History in the Making

No abstract provided.

Film Review: Passing, Cecelia Smith

History in the Making

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Reckoning With Slavery: Gender, Kinship, And Capitalism In The Early Black Atlantic, Brittany Mondragon

History in the Making

No abstract provided.

Bell Hooks (1952–2021), Cecelia Smith

History in the Making

No abstract provided.

Uprooted: Doorway Gardens And African Plant Cultivation In The Colonial Atlantic World, Brittany Mondragon

History in the Making

Approximately twelve million enslaved African people were uprooted from their homes and sent to the New World to work as free forced labor on plantation fields. Meanwhile, African plants also made their own triangular voyage across the Atlantic as slave ship captains gathered provisions for the seafaring journey or Africans stowed away food as they embarked on an unknown and horrifying journey. While attention on the transatlantic trade nexus often focuses on food and cash crops traveling between Europe and the Americas, several different produce of African origins were transplanted in America and often found in enslaved people’s provision gardens. …

The Cultural Capital Bronx Residents Possess, Mark Naison

Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP)

No abstract provided.

The Cultural Capital Bronx Residents Possess, Mark Naison

Occasional Essays

No abstract provided.

North Omaha Begins A New Chapter, Preston Love Jr.

Black Studies Faculty Publications

Preston Love Jr.'s Community Columnist web article discusses the historical economic devastation that this community experienced for generations, and the new chapter full of potential for North Omaha.

Social Justice Autobiography, Jeffrey Mckee

Writing Beyond the Prison Living Archive

Essay

Panic At The Picture Show: Southern Movie Theatre Culture And The Struggle To Desegregate, Susannah L. Broun

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

This paper explores the complex desegregation process of movie theatres in the southern United States. Building off of historiography that investigates regulations of postwar teenage sexuality and recent scholarly work that acknowledges the link between sexuality and civil rights, I argue that movie theatres had a uniquely delayed desegregation process due to perceived sexual intrigue of the dark, private theatre space. Through analysis of drive-in and hardtop theatres, censorship of on-screen content, and youth involvement in desegregation, I contend that anxieties of interracial intimacy and unsupervised teenage sexuality produced this especially prolonged integration process.

Marietta J. Tanner, Mark Naison

Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP)

Interviewee: Marietta J. Tanner

Interviewers: Mark Naison, Donna Joseph, Saudah Muhammad

Date: July 2020

Summarized by Sophia Maier

Marietta J. Tanner was born in 1928 in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Influenced by the activism of her father and the wartime experiences of her uncle, Marietta is a life-long political activist. Her parents explained to her from a young age their experiences in Jim Crow era Pennsylvania and by the age of six she was passing out political pamphlets and registering people to vote with the rest of her family. After attending a segregated school in her youth and a brief period …

The Malleability Of Home: A Genealogy Of Clark University's English House, Christina Rose Walcott, Justin Shaw

English

This essay details the history of the land and structures that occupy the property currently located at the corner of Hawthorne and Woodland Streets in Worcester, Mass. Covering over 300 years, it begins with the legacies of the Nipmuc and the early English colonialist settlers before moving into a discussion of Worcester's 19th Century industrialists and 20th Century acquisition by the University. The essay builds on extensive archival research using materials from both physical and digital collections such as atlases, censuses, biographies, directories, criticism, and more. To further develop the story of the English Department and its home, the essay …

Convening On The Future Of Black Thriving & Joy, Office Of The President, Portland State University, Justice Oregon For Black Lives

Global Diversity and Inclusion Publications and Presentations

This co-creation event aims to be an asset-based intergenerational, inter-ideological, and intercultural opportunity for listening, shared learning, and recognition of points of synergy and opportunity across the rich complexity of the black community in our area -- resulting in a shared agenda and momentum for action.

This affinity/identity based/closed event focuses on the black community and is part of a series of conversations with the different BIPOC communities as stated in the Time to Act plan created as a result of the October 2020 Time to Act summit. As a result of these conversations, Portland State University is seeking to …

Voices From The Past: Slave Narratives, Various, Odbayar Batsaikhan, Carrie Lewis Miller

All Resources

Openly licensed anthology focused on the theme of slave narratives. Contains: Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave by Isaac Mason; The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom by Wilbur H. Siebert; Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman by Austin Steward; Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave by William Wells Brown; The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave by Mary Prince; Our Nig; Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-story White House by Harriet E. Wilson; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself by …

Black (Muslim) Lives Matter: African American Muslim Social Activism, Jacob C. Riccioni

The Hilltop Review

Over the past eight years, the Black Lives Matter movement has advocated for marginalized communities within the African American population and called for police brutality and anti-black racism to be abolished. With the rise of Black Lives Matter in contemporary society, I am left wondering, do African American Muslims support the Black Lives Matter movement? There is no simple answer for African American Muslim leaders and laypeople because the Black Lives Matter movement supports LGBTQ+ rights, which some Muslims do not condone, and some rallies have broken out into riots. Religious leaders and scholars are split between supporting Black Lives …