Browsing by Subject "Black history"

In Selma, Alabama in 1965, local African Americans partnered with civil rights organizations to stage a movement for voting rights. The beating of peaceful black marchers by white state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that March catapulted the city and black demands for the ballot into the national spotlight. When the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed five months later, it cemented Selma as a symbol of voting rights. Since then, Selma has become a triumphal moment in the grand narrative of American democracy and citizenship. However, the years after the voting rights movement failed to bring economic opportunities and justice for black citizens in Selma. At the end of the twentieth century, numbing unemployment, gutted houses, and government transfer payments attested to barriers left unbroken by the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. How, then, did Selma become the site of a nationally-geared campaign for voting rights, and why was the right to vote not enough to bring economic justice for African Americans?

This dissertation is a local study that spans the course of century, one that looks at Selma and Dallas County as a place with a long history shaped by white supremacy and agricultural transformation, as well as local relationships and national developments. It begins in 1901, the year that the newly-passed Alabama constitution took the ballot away from nearly every African American in the state, and ends in 2000, when Selma's residents elected their first black mayor. Using newspapers and magazines, personal papers, organizational records, municipal records, federal publications, and oral histories, it examines how municipal, state, and national politics, as well as enormous economic shifts, intersected with and altered the lives of black and white residents in Dallas County, Alabama.

The multifaceted struggle of African Americans for freedom in Dallas County unfolded within the context of a century-long agricultural revolution in the Black Belt. African Americans' overlapping demands for economic opportunity, self-sufficiency, quality education, and meaningful political representation reflected and responded to local economic shifts from cotton to cattle to industry. The semi-autonomous community black Dallas County residents forged through farmers' organizations, schools, and societies under segregation later helped them mount a frontal challenge to the ramparts of white supremacy. The civil rights movement, however, grew to maturity at exactly the moment when cattle had usurped cotton's reign over the fields, altering the Black Belt's economic and social fabric.

Political rights for African Americans in Dallas County did not solve the postwar economic challenges of vanishing farms and the rise of low-wage industry. Meanwhile, local white officials vigorously fought to maintain political control in the wake of the civil rights movement. Their calculated intransigence delayed the meaningful participation of black residents in the economic and political life of Selma. The rise of the Sunbelt South and globalization further siphoned resources away from the struggling Black Belt. As the federal government retracted and nearby military bases closed in the late 1970s and 1980s, rural areas like Dallas County were left without resources in a new economy that favored high-skilled workers in urban centers. Examining black freedom struggles and economic transformation side-by-side illuminates how voting rights alone did not alter the regional network that concentrated both resources and poverty in an uneven process of development.

The vote brought political power, but it did not bring the economic justice, security, or quality education that made up the other half of African Americans' demands for freedom. By singularly focusing on the securing of voting rights, Selma became a pivotal moment in the story of American democracy, but black Dallas County residents' parallel demands for equal economic opportunities remained long after African Americans had won the vote. The triumphal narrative ignores the economic transformation that fundamentally altered the Black Belt. From cotton to cattle, industry to unemployment checks, black citizens perpetually found themselves on the losing end of economic change. At the end of the century, nearly four decades of federal divestment and globalization had sapped Dallas County of jobs, and the government's presence was felt mainly in the form of disability checks and food assistance. The political rights black Dallas County citizens had shed blood for in 1965 could not alone undo this legacy of economic inequality.

This project explores spiritual wellbeing for descendants of enslaved Africans at historically and predominately white institutions of higher education, through the hermeneutical and phenomenological accounts of past and present Black curators of spiritual wellbeing. By focusing on the accounts of religious and spiritual affairs professionals, my research encompasses thirty years of studying the spiritual and emotional wellbeing of Black folks in higher education, in part by speaking with the oldest living Black religious professional to integrate higher education. But first, this project will look back to the historical establishment of higher education institutions being spaces that trained and equipped white clergymen with tools and practices for developing and maintaining healthy (white) souls while simultaneously omitting care and lacking concern for the souls of Black folks. This project explores the rise of "Well-Being" pedagogies in higher education while simultaneously juxtaposing them with desegregation and integration practices. By grounding the project in the historicity of higher education and the systemic exclusion of Black bodies from higher education, the curators' accounts and the stories of the constituents have roots more profound than the present. Accordingly, this thesis captures the practices for repairing one's humanity— a spiritual act— after repeated attacks to devalue one's presence and existence. The question that this thesis seeks to answer is if wellness is a desired locale for all students (faculty and staff), should administrations consider the importance of having a curator for spiritual wellbeing, especially one particularly for Black descendants of enslaved Africans (DEA) who labor under and resonate with the Black experience in America.

This project explores spiritual wellbeing for descendants of enslaved Africans at historically and predominately white institutions of higher education, through the hermeneutical and phenomenological accounts of past and present Black curators of spiritual wellbeing. By focusing on the accounts of religious and spiritual affairs professionals, my research encompasses thirty years of studying the spiritual and emotional wellbeing of Black folks in higher education, in part by speaking with the oldest living Black religious professional to integrate higher education. But first, this project will look back to the historical establishment of higher education institutions being spaces that trained and equipped white clergymen with tools and practices for developing and maintaining healthy (white) souls while simultaneously omitting care and lacking concern for the souls of Black folks. This project explores the rise of "Well-Being" pedagogies in higher education while simultaneously juxtaposing them with desegregation and integration practices. By grounding the project in the historicity of higher education and the systemic exclusion of Black bodies from higher education, the curators' accounts and the stories of the constituents have roots more profound than the present. Accordingly, this thesis captures the practices for repairing one's humanity— a spiritual act— after repeated attacks to devalue one's presence and existence. The question that this thesis seeks to answer is if wellness is a desired locale for all students (faculty and staff), should administrations consider the importance of having a curator for spiritual wellbeing, especially one particularly for Black descendants of enslaved Africans (DEA) who labor under and resonate with the Black experience in America.

In the century and a half since Emancipation, slavery has remained a central topic at Somerset Place, a plantation-turned-state historic site in northeastern North Carolina, and programmers and audiences have thought about and interpreted it in many different ways. When North Carolina's Department of Archives and History first adopted the former plantation into its Historic Sites System in 1967, Somerset was dedicated to memorializing the planter, Josiah Collins III; the enslaved rarely made it into the site's narrative at all, and if they did it was as objects rather than subjects. In the final decades of the twentieth century, Somerset Place began to celebrate the lives of the 850 slaves who lived and worked at the plantation during the antebellum era, framing their history as a story about kinship, triumph and reconciliation. Both versions of the story--as well as the many other stories that the site has told since the end of slavery in 1865--require careful historical analysis and critique.

This dissertation considers Somerset's history and varying interpretations since the end of Reconstruction. It examines the gradual invention of Somerset Place State Historic Site in order to explore the nature and implications of representations of slavery, and the development of Americans' historical consciousness of slavery during their nation's long transition into freedom. It employs manuscript sources; oral histories and interviews; public documents, records and reports; and material artifacts in order to trace Somerset's gradual shift from a site of agricultural production to one of cultural representation, situated within North Carolina's developing public history programming and tourism industry. This research joins a rich body of literature that addresses southern history, epistemology, memory, and politics. It is comparative: it sets two centuries side by side, excavating literal cause-and-effect--the ways in which the events of the nineteenth century led to those of the twentieth--and their figurative relationship, the dialectical play between the ante- and post-bellum worlds. By examining the ways twentieth-century Americans employed the antebellum era as an intellectual and cultural category, this dissertation sheds light on slavery's diverse legacies and the complexity of living with collective historical traumas.

This dissertation examines amelioration – the effort to create a more “humane” or reformed version of slavery – as it intertwined with enslaved people’s everyday conflicts and the legal system of the Jamaican colonial state. In the context of a rising anti-slavery movement in metropolitan Britain, some pro-slavery advocates adopted colonial legal reform as a strategy to present slavery as redeemable and colonial governments as capable of restraining slaveholders’ worst impulses. While these reformers were often cynical in their aims, enslaved people took these proclaimed legal rights seriously and strategically mobilized their rhetoric to secure a semblance of justice and redress within – and without – the legal system. Whether through fighting in court for the return of their stolen possessions, or seeking justice for a friend brutally murdered by an overseer, enslaved people were savvy and calculated legal actors who stretched the modest reforms conceded by the state. Each dissertation chapter develops a thematic approach to a key area of the law of slavery– enslaved people’s flight, property ownership, maltreatment by enslavers, and criminal procedure – and examines enslaved peoples’ attempts to strategically mobilize reformist legal principles to secure rights and justice within the legal system. In the process, the centrality of the legal system to the maintenance of the broader edifice of white supremacy and plantocracy is also considered.

This dissertation is a social history of the city of Detroit in the 1970s. Using archives official and unofficial - oral histories and archived document collections, self-published memoirs and legal documents, personal papers and the newspapers of the radical press - it portrays a city in flux. It was in the 1970s that the urban crisis in the cities of the United States crested. Detroit, as had been the case throughout the twentieth century, was at the forefront of these changes. This dissertation demonstrates the local social, political, and economic circumstances that contributed to the dramatic increase in prison populations since the 1970s with a focus on the halls of government, the courtroom, and city streets. In the streets, unemployed African American youth organized themselves to counteract the contracted social distribution allocated to them under rapidly changing economic circumstances. They organized themselves for creative expression, protection and solidarity in a hostile city, and to pursue economic endeavors in the informal economy. They sometimes committed crimes. In the courts, Wayne County Juvenile Court Judge James Lincoln, a liberal Democrat long allied with New Deal political alliances, became disenchanted with rehabilitative solutions to juvenile delinquency and embraced more punitive measures, namely incarceration. In city hall, Coleman Young, the city's first African American mayor, confronted this crisis with a form of policing that concentrated predominately on the city's unemployed African American youth, and the result was the criminalization of poverty and race we have come to understand as mass incarceration.