A History of African American Autobiography

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Personal Essays ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

This History explores innovations in African American autobiography since its inception, examining the literary and cultural history of Black self-representation amid life writing studies. By analyzing the different forms of autobiography, including pictorial and personal essays, editorials, oral histories, testimonials, diaries, personal and open letters, and even poetry performance media of autobiographies, this book extends the definition of African American autobiography, revealing how people of African descent have created and defined the Black self in diverse print cultures and literary genres since their arrival in the Americas. It illustrates ways African Americans use life writing and autobiography to address personal and collective Black experiences of identity, family, memory, fulfillment, racism and white supremacy. Individual chapters examine scrapbooks as a source of self-documentation, African American autobiography for children, readings of African American persona poems, mixed-race life writing after the Civil Rights Movement, and autobiographies by African American LGBTQ writers.

Not as It Is Written

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
International Exhibition ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Made In

This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Elaine Allen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Southern States ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Martin Luther King

The introduction includes Bible verses cited by ministers to defend segregation and verses to oppose segregation. There are slices of the history of the United States, the Civil Rights Movement, and African American history. The southern states, where white ministers confronted segregation, are identified. The term “minister” is explained as well as the variety of labels given these ministers ranging from “Liberal,” Progressive,” “Neo-Orthodox,” “Evangelical Liberal,” “open conservative,” ‘Last Hurrah of the Social Gospel Movement” to “Trouble Maker,” “Traitor, “ “Atheist,” “Communist,” “N_____ Lover.” Rachel Henderlite, the only woman minister mentioned in the book, is identified. Synopses of the book’s seven chapters are included. Comments by historians David Chappell, Charles Reagan Wilson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ernest Campbell, and Thomas Pettigrew are cited.

Race Women

2019 ◽  
pp. 70-100
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Women ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the fascinating history of Bennett College – one of only two single sex colleges dedicated to educating African American women. Although Bennett would not make that transition until 1926, the institution played a vital role in educating African American women in Greensboro, North Carolina from the betrayal of the Nadir to the promises of a New Negro Era. The latter period witnessed Bennett, under the leadership of David Dallas Jones, mold scores of young girls into politically conscious race women who were encouraged to resist Jim Crow policies and reject the false principals of white supremacy. Their politicization led to a massive boycott of a theatre in downtown Greensboro and helped to set the tone for Greensboro’s evolution into a critical launching point for the modern civil rights movement.

The Intimate Civic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindon Barrett
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Mary Prince ◽  
Private Rights ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
History Of

This chapter turns to the personal and in some cases domestic issues facing African Americans in the antebellum period. Turning from Douglass's classic 1845 Narrative to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)—which receives central consideration in this chapter—Barrett also considers Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831), Ellen and William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), and James C. Pennington's The Fugitive Blacksmith (1849) as antebellum representations of how African American bodies connect both public and private rights in the struggle for the abolition of slavery and thus are foundational to the subsequent civil rights movement.

An African American Dilemma

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoë Burkholder
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Education ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Community Empowerment ◽  
School Integration ◽  
American Dilemma ◽  
History Of

Since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Americans have viewed school integration as a central tenet of the Black civil rights movement. Yet school integration was not the only—or even always the dominant—civil rights strategy. At times, African Americans also fought for separate, Black-controlled schools dedicated to racial uplift, community empowerment, and self-determination. An African American Dilemma offers a social history of debates over school integration within northern Black communities from the 1840s to the present. This broad geographical and temporal focus reveals that northern Black educational activists vacillated between a preference for either school integration or separation during specific eras. However, there was never a consensus, so the dissent, debate, and counter-narratives that pushed families to consider a fuller range of educational reforms are also highlighted here. Presenting a sweeping historical analysis that covers the entire history of public education in the North, the book broadens our understanding of school integration by highlighting the diverse perspectives of Black students, parents, teachers, and community leaders all committed to improving public education. It finds that Black school integrationists and separatists have worked together in a dynamic tension that fueled effective strategies for educational reform and the Black civil rights movement. The book draws on an enormous range of archival data including the black press, school board records, social science studies, the papers of civil rights activists, and court cases.

Early Struggles

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sid Bedingfield
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Insurance Industry ◽  
The South ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Supremacists

This chapter introduces John Henry McCray, the young African-American editor whose newspaper would play a key role in reviving civil rights activism in the South Carolina. Raised in Lincolnville, an all-black village near Charleston, South Carolina, McCray gave up a relatively comfortable insurance-industry job to launch a newspaper in 1935. He teamed up with NAACP activists and used his newspaper to battle conservative forces in the black community who wanted to “accommodate” white supremacist rule. The chapter details the history of “accommodationism,” which re-gained strength in South Carolina after white supremacists crushed a nascent civil rights movement in the early 1920s.

This Is Not Dixie

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent M. S. Campney
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Property Damage ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Definition Of

Often defined as a mostly southern phenomenon, racist violence existed everywhere. This book explodes the notion of the Midwest as a so-called land of freedom with an in-depth study of assaults both active and threatened faced by African Americans in post-Civil War Kansas. The book's definition of white-on-black violence encompasses not only sensational demonstrations of white power like lynchings and race riots, but acts of threatened violence and the varied forms of pervasive routine violence—property damage, rape, forcible ejection from towns—used to intimidate African Americans. As the book shows, such methods were a cornerstone of efforts to impose and maintain white supremacy. Yet the book's broad consideration of racist violence also lends new insights into the ways people resisted threats. African Americans spontaneously hid fugitives and defused lynch mobs while also using newspapers and civil rights groups to lay the groundwork for forms of institutionalized opposition that could fight racist violence through the courts and via public opinion. Ambitious and provocative, this book rewrites fundamental narratives on mob action, race relations, African American resistance, and racism's grim past in the heartland.

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