Browsing by Author "Lentz-Smith, Adriane"

“Into the Mainstream and Oblivion” is a study of the intellectual and political biography of the African American writer and political activist Julian Hudson Mayfield. As a member of the black Left, Mayfield’s life of activism and art bring the complex network of artists, activists, and political theorists who influenced the construction, tactics, and strategies of social movements during the latter half of the twentieth century into sharper focus revealing the ways in which black, modernist writing served as a critical site of political, social, and cultural ferment during the Cold War. Using art to communicate ideas and arguments about the relationship between race, gender, and political economy, Mayfield and his contemporaries illuminate the broader influence of black writers on American culture and politics. In addition, the state’s response to Mayfield’s life of literary activism sheds light on the ways in which anti-communism worked to disrupt, marginalize, and dampen the effect of challenges to white supremacy.

The project makes extensive use of archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Life in Harlem, which houses the archives of Julian Mayfield and many of his contemporaries. In addition to these primary source documents, this project examines government documents produced by the extensive surveillance of African American writers by various government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of State, and United States Information Agency. Finally, the dissertation has benefitted from a close working relationship with the family of Julian Mayfield and oral histories from contemporaries which sheds light on the complex interplay of gender and class among black social movements during the latter half of the twentieth century.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were inherently unequal and detrimental to students’ educational experiences. Just three decades later, school boards and communities across the United States ended desegregation programs and returned to largely segregated schools based on housing patterns, claiming that these arrangements would be more equitable than desegregation programs. How and why did desegregation disappear from the definition of educational equity? Contrary to extant scholarship in public policy and educational history, the end of desegregation was neither a backlash nor an inevitability. Rather, it was a policy choice embraced by communities across the political spectrum and across racial lines. I explore that choice and its consequences by looking at how resegregation reshaped a self-professed progressive Sunbelt city: Austin, Texas. In the 1980s, Austinites gradually altered their definition of educational equity to make segregated schools compliant with new ideas of the purpose of public education. My work highlights how a combination of the Reagan administration’s dismantling of busing and local-level discussions of compromise created a new educational reality centered on the belief that separate schools could be equitable, if not equal. By examining Austin’s tri-ethnic Black, Mexican American, and white perspectives, I show that the end of school desegregation came alongside a change in Black Austinites’ willingness to bear the burden of desegregation, erasure in Mexican American experiences, and division among white Austinites over the benefits of desegregation. My dissertation makes three key interventions. Over the past fifteen years, historians have demonstrated the failed promise of desegregation as a panacea to racism and structural inequalities. Most historical studies end at the implementation of desegregation and take the move away from busing for granted. I build upon these studies to present a novel periodization of educational desegregation history moving from the 1950s and 1960s into the 1980s. Second, I reconsider the concept of “educational equity” and its fundamental claims. While the Brown v. Board of Education decision emphasized segregation as inherently detrimental to students, contemporary educational policy discussions generally do not consider integration as a component of educational equity. I demonstrate the fundamental emptiness of the idea of “educational equity” by tracing its origins to anti-busing movements and color-blind racism. Finally, I argue that the end of busing came as part of the Nixon and Reagan administration’s efforts to recast the purpose of education, not just from individual community decisions. Methodologically, I construct my arguments through historical practices of archival examinations documenting change over time, while incorporating scholarship from public policy and legal scholars as both primary and secondary sources. My project brings history and public policy together in assessing the steps that a progressive city took not to implement desegregation, but to reverse it.

From the Civil War through the end the 1800s, thousands of African Americansleft North Carolina for greater freedoms in various parts of the United States and abroad. Tracing African American refugees from a Civil War contraband camp on Roanoke Island, NC through generations of migration attempts, this dissertation explores the underground information networks and knowledge systems Black North Carolinians used to transmit information and make sense of their condition in the United States. Through a concept I term, “geopolitical knowledge,” I demonstrate how African Americans used kinship networks, literacy, knowledge of waterways and geography, political savvy, and religion to make freedom on their own terms. Importantly, I center religion and spirituality in shaping African Americans’ perception of freedom, community, and hope in the postbellum world. Building on Charles Long’s conception of “orientation,” I examine how African Americans used religion as a site of knowledge production and meaning making. Religion encapsulated more than adherence to a particular deity or practice, but a means through which to remap their epistemological worlds.

“Taking the Moral Ground” examines the relationship between Protestantism and the movements for feminist and gay equality in North Carolina during the 1970s and 1980s to answer two central questions: How did a group of white heterosexual clergy, moderate mainliners, and African American ministers in central North Carolina become the spokespersons for feminist and gay liberation in the 1970s and 1980s? What did the theoretical frameworks of organized religion offer that made these types of unlikely alliances possible? To answer these questions “Taking the Moral Ground” begins with an exploration of the religious values that framed the upbringing, activist career, and ministry of Pauli Murray, a native of North Carolina and the first African American woman ordained by the Episcopal Church. Emphasizing the importance of the black freedom struggle and a universal understanding of human rights to her ministry, this dissertation moves on to explore how the key tenets Murray championed—universal love and justice—played out as religious feminists fought for women’s equality within a platform of intersectional social justice across North Carolina in the 1970s. Against the backdrop of a burgeoning movement for women’s liberation and the rise of the New Right, women across the state melded the philosophies of the social gospel with feminist practices like consciousness raising. They fought for stronger female representation at Duke Divinity School, more professional opportunities for women clergy, and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. In the 1980s, gay Christians and moderate clergy picked up where feminists left off as they formed alliances with anti-racist groups and agitated for the acceptance of the LGBTQ community in local churches while simultaneously drawing on Christian values to support citizenship rights for gays and lesbians across the state. While organized religion provided plenty of obstacles to transplanting this vision of the religiously-driven inclusivity onto campaigns for women’s rights and gay liberation, it also offered institutional frameworks, rituals of belonging, and a certain theological flexibility that most strictly secular movements lacked. In this way, many of the religious coalitions forged during the 1970s and 1980s in North Carolina exceeded the effectiveness and organizational breadth of other strictly secular groups across the state and nation.

In this dissertation, I use women’s marriage rights as framed in the 1962 United Nations Marriage Convention to demonstrate the contradictions contained within human rights that allow them to be coopted into the preservation of systems of power, from imperialism to Jim Crow. The treaty’s creators in the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) designed it to defend women’s marriage consent. Delegates pursued a higher age of marriage and more government registration of marriage, and they specifically pushed for the abolition of child marriage, polygamy, and bride price systems. The Marriage Convention’s standards of family resonated with many delegates and policymakers, including segregationist Senators in the United States who otherwise distrusted outside intervention into domestic affairs because they found within the treaty’s human rights project an opportunity to shore up state anti-miscegenation laws.

Conflicts about what human rights were and how best to defend them took shape through the debates about the Marriage Convention, both in the United Nations and in the United States as proponents pressured the Senate to ratify it. Beginning after World War II and ending with the 1967 Senate hearing that ended the Marriage Convention’s future in the United States, I examine events that catalyzed transformations in human rights, including the end of World War II, the founding of the United Nations, the Cold War, and decolonization. I focus especially on the United States, where these international changes dovetailed with those caused by civil and women’s rights movements domestically to make for a complex reception of human rights treaties. I use official United Nations documents, State Department and Women’s Bureau records, newspapers, representatives’ personal papers, and the records of women’s organizations to illustrate the ways that delegates and lawmakers mobilized rights claims as they debated the Marriage Convention.

I argue that the appropriation of human rights by systems of power should not be taken as a corruption of the human rights project but as part of the process of shaping human rights concepts. All parties interested in the Marriage Convention pursued the relationship between marriage and state power to serve their own ends, whether those ends were protecting women, strengthening national governance, or preserving Jim Crow segregation laws. I conclude that supporters of the Marriage Convention were primarily successful in advancing their cause where it coincided with the normal racist and sexist operation of US power at home and abroad. The Marriage Convention speaks to broader changes in the history of human rights, but the treaty’s specific relationship to issues of gender and race through marriage make for a story of rights unique to it.