Browsing by Subject "Black Americans"

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    “100 Dollars and Other Valuable Considerations”
    (2022-04-20) Reneau, Olivia
    Land and homeownership are topics of much debate, concern, and intervention in modern Black political thought. Discussion of Black land loss, while longitudinal in scope, often places the origins of Black land ownership in the early 1900s. In this paper, I challenge this notion, first placing the origin of Black land ownership in the antebellum period and examining Black land ownership for the following century. To do so, I constructed the narratives of six Black-owned parcels from their acquisition to their status in 1950. My first chapter offers a brief exploration of the history of Black ownership between 1850 and 1950. In my second chapter, I examine the circumstances of the deprivation of that land, inclusive of the political, economic, and white-supremacist tools used to do so. In my third chapter, I consider conceptions of Black land from prominent Black authors like W.E.B. DuBois to the presence of land in abolitionist politics. Then, I offer the complete histories of six formerly Black-owned parcels of land from 1850 to 1950 and the presence of tools of preservation and deprivation of Black ownership in these parcels. I conclude with a brief analysis of the five parcels, an acknowledgment of the limitations of this work, and a discussion of the significance of this work on Black vital records research. By the end of the period, only two parcels were possessed by Black individuals, and only one of those was a direct connection through shared lineage. The chains of title created during this research indicate that wills and end-of-life legal planning best-ensured property were successfully passed from one Black owner to the next, a mechanism that heavily favored families in wealthy, free, Black communities.
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    Explorations of Black Health in America: The Effects of Trust on Health Care Utilization between U.S.-Born Black Americans and Black Foreign-Born African Immigrants
    (2022-04) Ezem, Natalie
    Historically, those that identify with the African diaspora have had a complicated and understudied relationship with the United States medical system. Available literature makes generalizations related to different populations across the African diaspora because they are all labeled under the “black” racial group. Consequently, this qualitative study investigated the impact of trust on health care utilization between black foreign-born African immigrants, including first and second-generation immigrants, compared to black Americans born in the United States. There were six U.S.-born black American participants and five black foreign-born African immigrants, resulting in a total of eleven in-depth interviews. When evaluating the role of trust in using resources within the healthcare system across both study populations, there seemed to be no clear conclusion on its impact. Some participants considered trust as one of their top three factors influencing how they utilized health care resources, while others indicated that it was not important to them at all. Some participants also noted that trust interacted with their personal identifiers – such as gender, race, and socioeconomic status – and their health care utilization. Additionally, the study revealed a high level of trust in individual providers but not the healthcare system as an institution for U.S.-born black Americans. On the other hand, black foreign-born African immigrants from West Africa had a significantly higher level of trust in the United States healthcare system compared to those from the Central, Eastern, and Southern regions of Africa. While there is variability in trust between the sample populations, participants mentioned that their level of trust in the United States healthcare system and their usage of resources would increase if there was more staff diversity, improvements in cultural competency surrounding different medical practices, and greater accessibility to quality care, especially in low-income communities.