African American History

"ABSTRACT

Before World War II, popular American culture, including newspapers, radio, and cinema, regularly depicted beauty as necessarily white. Similarly, mainstream magazines, board games, postcards, dolls, and virtually every form of visual media and material culture presented the image of the black woman as either that of the hypersexual sex worker “Jezebel” or the unattractive house servant “Mammy.” Faced with such negative and maligned representations of their race in the popular media, a number of enterprising businesswomen set out in the decades after WWII to change the stereotypical mass representation of black women. African-American modeling and charm school owners –such as New York City’s Ophelia DeVore and Barbara Watson, Berkeley’s Annette Starr, and Cleveland’s Artha Woods– applied their ventures in beauty and business towards promoting social change. In part because of their hard work, mainstream cultural outlets began to depict women of color as attractive, poised, and professional. African-American modeling and charm school owners conceptualized their life’s work as an important part of the mid-twentieth century’s Civil Rights Movement. In doing so, black beauty entrepreneurs used for-profit business enterprise as a means to promote sweeping social change in America."

This thesis focuses on the archaeological study of the Slave Cemetery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Here, methodological and theoretical principles are utilized to study the area that many enslaved workers call their final resting place. Through the use of this space, it is hypothesized that Mount Vernon’s enslaved community practiced distinct traditions, instilling in that spot a sense of place, and reinforcing their individual and communal human identities. This thesis will also investigate the cemetery within its broader regional and cultural contexts, to attain a better understanding of the death rituals and culturally resistant activates that slaves at Mount Vernon used in their day-to-day battle against the system that held them in bondage.

Within the territories under the dominion of the Iberian monarchies, on both sides of the Atlantic, we seek to approach the cult rendered to Saint Iphigenia mainly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition to the specialized bibliography, we rely on the first European and American publications that gave news about this African saint, as well as on the brotherhoods that were the driving force of devotion. With all this, we have raised a geography of images to Iphigenia in sculpture and painting in three continents, and we show how the 1738 Carmelite model of the friar José Pereira de Santana dominated in the representations of the saint in Europe, Africa and in Portuguese America, not so in the American territories of the Hispanic monarchy, being these images particularly novel and some of them unpublished.

The essay that launched Afrofuturism. Introductory essay, in which the term is coined and theorized in depth, followed by interviews exploring the idea with leading African-American cultural theorists. From the collection FLAME WARS, edited by Mark Dery, 01/1994; Duke University Press., ISBN: 0822315408.

Apologia— Several exceptions notwithstanding (e.g., some titles treating the Reconstruction Era), this bibliography begins, roughly, with the twentieth century. I have not attempted to comprehensively cover works of nonfiction or the arts generally but, once more, I have made— and this time, a fair number of—exceptions by way of providing a taste of the requisite material. So, apart from the constraints of most of my other bibliographies: books, in English, these particular constraints are intended to keep the bibliography to a fairly modest length (around one hundred pages). This compilation is far from exhaustive, although it endeavors to be representative of the available literature, whatever the influence of my idiosyncratic beliefs and preferences. I trust the diligent researcher will find titles on particular topics or subject areas by browsing carefully through the list. I welcome notice of titles by way of remedying any deficiencies. Finally, I have a separate bibliography on slavery, although its scope is well beyond U.S. history.

* Or, if you prefer, " self-fulfillment and human flourishing (eudaimonia). " I'm not here interested in the question of philosophical and psychological differences between these concepts (i.e.. self-realization, eudaimonia, etc.) and the existing and possible conceptions thereof, but more simply and broadly in their indispensable significance in reference to human nature and the pivotal metaphysical and moral purposes they serve in our critical and evaluative exercises (e.g., and after Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, in employing criteria derived from the notion of 'human capabilities and functionings') as part of our individual and collective historical quest for " the Good. "

The most necessary part of any social analysis is that it has to be researched and recorded by the person who is a representative of the majority of the people in the social setting. To truly understand how to provide a social analysis that will serve as an accurate model to depend on,

This article is specifically situated on Mount Auburn Cemetery, Maryland’s first Black owned and operated cemetery, examining the numerous social and historical factors that shaped, transformed, and ultimately led to a small African American burial ground becoming a business.  Founded in 1807 by the seven trustees of Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church (Baltimore’s oldest African Methodist Church which dates back to 1787), Mount Auburn Cemetery gave African Americans, free and enslaved, a right to freedom through death. African Americans could not control their enslaved and marginalized lives, but they could control their deaths. Post emancipation, the cemetery strategized a move to South Baltimore, bought more land, embarking on an economic partnership with a newly formed African American community by the name of Hullsville. The cemetery professionalized and became a business paving the way for independent African American undertakers. This article places Mount Auburn Cemetery as a unit of analysis in order to illustrate the historical significance of Mount Auburn Cemetery to the African American community.

Before Busing will recover and reposition the “long history of the civil rights movement” in Boston, from the Antebellum period through the recent past, filling in a crucial gap in the current historiography of the black freedom movement.  While educational equality is a central theme running through the manuscript, the book will situate those efforts within a broader context of racial justice activism in the city that also targeted employment and housing discrimination, police brutality, access to public welfare benefits, social equality, cultural autonomy and more.  This research makes clear both the unique dynamics of African American activism in Boston, as well as the ways those protest politics fit within larger patterns of struggle across the urban North.  This new narrative will not only complicate the history of Boston, but also transform our understanding of racism in the U.S. beyond the Jim Crow South and the myriad ways black people and their allies have struggled against it.

Convocation Address at Bethel University, August 29, 2016 about recent troubles in Minnesota, particularly the shooting of Philando Castille, and our responsibility as followers of the Gospel. There is an audio link also available. After you click the link, it's the first one in the queue; fast-forward to 15:00:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/2016-2017-chapel-college-arts/id1148681753?mt=10

Black women activists between the First and Second World Wars fought on the "front lines" for racial equality in Louisiana, attests Lee Sartain, the author of Invisible Activists. Sartain's elegantly laid-out topic has enormous potential. We know very little about black women activists in the South in this time period (most historical scholarship focuses on women during Reconstruction or the Civil Rights era), and as the work of historians Elsa Barkley Brown, Annette Gordon-Reed and Deborah Gray White shows, when we learn more about African American women's historical activities, we often reframe the dominant narratives of major periods of American history. Thus Sartain's focus on women in the Louisiana National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a welcome addition to the fields of African American historiography, women's history, and the history of social movements. Published in Women and Social Movements online journal, Sept. 2008.

When residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, whose stories are told? All too often the lives of slaveowners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people. Behind the Big House gives readers a candid, behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to interpret the difficult history of slavery in the U.S. South. The book explores Jodi Skipper’s eight-year collaboration with the Behind the Big House program, a community-based model used at local historic sites to address slavery in the collective narrative of U.S. history and culture.

In laying out her experiences through an autoethnographic approach, Skipper also seeks to help other activist scholars of color negotiate the nuances of place, the academic public sphere, and its ambiguous systems of reward, recognition, and evaluation.

Paper delivered at the University of Michigan history department's graduate conference. This paper describes the tensions between established, white gay AIDS service providers and African American AIDS activists as the extent of the AIDS epidemic among the city's communities of color became clear during the middle of the 1980s, leading to the establishment of Blacks Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues (BEBASHI), the nation's first black AIDS service organization.

The issues of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ have been with us since the founding of our august republic. Unfortunately, they are perniciously still with us today. They were the reason we fought the Civil War (1861-1865) and have mired our history throughout. There is no period in our history, the history of the United States, when ‘race’ has not been significant in some profound way. For many reasons too, the American Civil War is still with us today. It is still with us in every racial conflict we have had since. It is still being fought, perhaps unknowingly by many African-Americans, who have experienced ‘structural violence’ in some way, whether in terms of wanting better education, better housing, or a better job, or even rights for a normal life. And it is still with us today when African-Americans are targeted unfairly by law enforcement.

In 1942, three Black soldiers were accused of raping a White woman on a Louisiana military base.  After being sentenced to death following a rushed trial, the NAACP, prompted by calls from the Black press, took over the soldiers' appeal.  Led by Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP was eventually successful in saving the men's lives and securing their freedom.

The mission and goal of Africana Studies is the development of cultural grounding, academic excellence, and social responsibility. Building the Basics: A Handbook for Developing Academic Excellence in Africana Studies focuses on the goal of developing students academically. Throughout students’ academic career, they will take a variety of courses and learn the course content. Many students enter higher education at different levels of preparation. Regardless of content or preparation, students should always build and develop the basics.

Building the Basics provides students with strategies, tips, and approaches to maximize learning. The handbook discusses the basics of working at home, critical thinking and questioning, skilled and critical reading, scholarly writing, working collaboratively in groups, and studying for quizzes and examines. Each chapter begins with guiding questions and key terms to prime students for what is to come in the chapter. In addition, each chapter concludes with activities for students. Building the Basics offers pragmatic strategies and approaches to master the fundamentals every student needs to enhance student learning in pursuit of academic excellence. 

https://he.kendallhunt.com/product/building-basics-handbook-pursuing-academic-excellence-africana-studies

In the book “Good Soldiers” I include the August 1778 “Return of the Negroes in the Army” and the proportions of black soldiers (via percentages) in each of the fifteen brigades and for the entire force. The return includes those men sick present, but leaves out soldiers who were sick absent. The revised African American percentages reflecting brigade strengths without the sick absent men is given in the book below the transcribed army return, but I thought it most useful to share the “Return of … Negroes” as it should be interpreted.

Christopher Buck, “Plessy v. Ferguson.” Encyclopedia of African American History. Edited by Leslie Alexander & Walter Rucker. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010. Pp. 959–963 (Vol. 3).

ABSRACT

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the principle problem of the 20th century will be that of the color line. Being black was “strange” largely because of the estrangement between the races in America. The “color line” was drawn in bold by Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). By keeping the Jim Crow status quo, Plessy deepened the racial divide. This is the notorious “separate but equal” case. Although not part of the decision verbatim, these three words, which accurately express the legal fiction of the Supreme Court’s ruling, gave legal sanction to Jim Crow segregation. Thus “separate but equal” equals “Jim Crow affirmed.”

This opinion is couched in legal language that requires an understanding of constitutional law to decode. The high court held that the separation of the races within states does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, which had previously granted African Americans equal protection under the laws. The technical terms notwithstanding, the Court’s purport was patent. In black and white, Justice Henry Billings Brown kept blacks from whites. This bad result was “good law” for nearly six decades. It would take Brown v. the Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) to overrule Justice Brown. If, except for the Dred Scott case, Plessy was the worst Supreme Court ruling ever handed down, as Justice Harlan indicated in his dissent, then the Brown decision may rank as the greatest Supreme Court decision. To appreciate the greatness of Brown v. Board of Education, it is necessary to understand Plessy first.

Democracy is a process of progressive equalizing. It is a matter of degree. Mollified by democratic language and reasoning, nevertheless Plessy is a harsh and fundamentally undemocratic decision. More than undemocratic, it was antidemocratic because Plessy may be characterized as an antidemocratic reaction to the then-recent democratic reforms of Reconstruction (1865–1877).

Reconstruction was the nation’s first experiment in economic emancipation and interracial democracy. The three Reconstruction Amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments (1865, 1868, and 1870, respectively) established (legally but not factually) civil rights for all Americans. But the experiment failed; or rather, America failed the experiment. The reforms in- troduced by Reconstruction were being systematically dismantled in the South. For instance, the promise of “forty acres and a mule” was proclaimed by General William T. Sherman but never delivered by Congress. Reconstruction was progressive; Plessy was regressive. Plessy, in fact, was the ultimate deconstruction of Reconstruction—the final judicial nail in its historical coffin. Far worse were its social and historical consequences, for the decision legitimized legal segregation. Plessy was a pact with the devil of Jim Crow, and it legitimatized the American apartheid of systemic segregation.

Plessy’s “separate but equal” doctrine was an oxymoron. Yet, as the supreme law of the law, it held sway for well over a half-century. It would take the Brown decision to successfully overturn it. Brown v. Board of Edu- cation exposed the Plessy decision as a contradiction, ruling that “separate but equal” is inherently unequal.

Hamer that delves into her both her grassroots activism and the great personal price she paid for that activism. In her work, Lee successfully justifies her choice of title by offering a crucial examination of Hamer's activism on behalf of the poor, and the race and gender-specific hardships she suffered. While Lee's biography is not the first literary

Recent revisionist scholarship has argued that representations by white “outsider” observers of black American music have distorted historical truths about how the blues came to be. While these scholarly arguments have generated an interesting debate concerning how the music has been framed and disseminated, they have so far only told an American story, failing to acknowledge that in the post-war era the blues had spread far beyond the borders of the United States. As Christian O’Connell shows in Blues, How Do You Do? Paul Oliver’s largely neglected scholarship—and the unique transatlantic cultural context it provides—is vital to understanding the blues.


O’Connell’s study begins with Oliver’s scholarship in his early days in London as a writer for the British jazz press and goes on to examine Oliver’s encounters with visiting blues musicians, his State Department–supported field trip to the US in 1960, and the resulting photographs

and oral history he produced, including his epic “blues narrative,” The Story of the Blues (1969). Blues, How Do You Do? thus aims to move away from debates that have been confined within the limits of national borders—or relied on clichés of British bands popularizing American music in America—to explore how Oliver’s work demonstrates that the blues became a reified ideal, constructed in opposition to the forces of modernity.

Cet article examine la place des domestiques noires aux États-Unis entre le milieu des années 1930 et le milieu des années 1950 ainsi que les questions liées à la lutte pour l’amélioration de leurs conditions de travail et pour leur reconnaissance sociale, une lutte qui a lieu sur les lieux de travail via le développement du syndicalisme mais aussi dans la sphère socioculturelle où les logiques de ségrégation raciale et de suprématie blanche prédominent. En particulier, les femmes noires membres ou sympathisantes du Parti communiste américain constituent un courant militant désigné sous le nom de Black Left Feminism (féminisme noir de gauche) qui permet de sortir les domestiques de l’ombre et du silence et de porter un sujet jusqu’ici marginal au centre des débats des organisations du mouvement ouvrier et en faveur des droits civiques auxquelles elles appartiennent. Dans ce cadre, la contribution politique et artistique de la dramaturge Alice Childress mérite une attention toute particulière. Conversation From Life, sa série fictionnelle rédigée chaque mois de 1951 à 1955 pour le journal de la gauche noire Freedom, est la première tentative de représentation d’une domestique qui défend en même temps fierté noire, dignité ouvrière et pouvoir d’agir féminin dans un contexte de guerre froide où toute démarche de contestation est férocement réprimée. Mildred, le personnage principal, est le symbole du passage possible des femmes noires de la marge à l’avant-garde des luttes qui caractérisent cette période, en faveur des droits des noir.e.s, des salarié.e.s, des femmes et de la paix.

This paper examines the position of black women domestic workers in the United States from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s and their struggles for improved working conditions and social recognition, which primarily took place in the workplace through the development of trade unionism, as well as in the sociocultural sphere where the logics of racial segregation and white supremacy were predominant. Specifically, black women who were members or sympathizers of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) constituted a militant movement known as Black Left Feminism that placed black domestics at the heart of their analysis and artistic expression. This movement brought what was a hitherto marginal subject out of the shadows into the center of debate within the labor and civil rights organizations to which they belonged. In this context, playwright Alice Childress’s political and artistic contributions deserve special attention. From 1951 to 1955, Childress wrote a monthly fiction column titled Conversation From Life for the black left newspaper Freedom. Conversation From Life was the first attempt to depict a domestic worker who simultaneously defends black pride, workers' dignity and women's power to act, in spite of the repressive Cold War context that dominated U.S. society at the time. Mildred, the main character, symbolizes the possible transition of black women from the margins to the vanguard of the struggles for black people’s, workers’, and women’s rights, and for peace.

Reviews "Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed," the 1968 CBS News television documentary [DVD release by Phoenix Learning Group, 2008].  The program was narrated by Bill Cosby.  Andy Rooney received an Emmy Award for the script.  The 54-minute program had five parts.  (1) Cosby introduces African Americans who made an impact in U.S. history but were never recognized in the history books.  (2) the mental legacy of slavery and discrimination, demonstrated through Emanuel Hammer's use of projective drawing interpretation analysis.  (3) Clips of racist stereotyping in Hollywood films.  (4) How children's paintings illustrate how African American students can be harmed by racial attitudes.  (5) John Elliott Churchville's project to develop the self-esteem and self-confidence of African-American students.