Early African American Print Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Gardner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
The North ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Maria Stewart

Not until the end of the 20th century did scholars begin to look at early African American print culture in the depth it deserves. A story painfully intertwined with the transatlantic slave system and racism, early black print engagement combined, from its beginnings, responses to white aggression and a powerful set of individual and communal desires to read about, record, and, via print, share truths of black life in the United States. Some of the first creators of black print in the United States, from the authors of the earliest slave narratives to poet Phillis Wheatley, had to think through questions of individual and communal identity vis-à-vis emerging American socio-political structures and find ways to ensure control over their own voices in a white-dominated culture that tried to exclude, use, or abuse those voices. But early black print culture is not simply the story of a single genre like the slave narrative or of exceptional individuals like Wheatley. Rather, it is also the story of organizational print tied to churches, conventions, and activist groups. It is as well the story of a diverse range of modes, from the rich pamphleteering tradition (perhaps most excitingly expressed by David Walker) to early black periodicals like those edited by Samuel Cornish and Philip Bell. Especially after 1830, it also became the story of a range of black women (from Maria Stewart and Jarena Lee to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper), of African Americans across the North (and occasionally in the midst of the slave South), and of an increasing number of formats, genres, and approaches. And it became a story of how black activists might interact (in print and beyond) with white antislavery activists, recognizing both shared and different goals and philosophies as they attempted to fight not only for emancipation but for broader civil rights.

5. African American Christianity: The modern phase (1935–1980)

2014 ◽  
pp. 65-79
Author(s):  
Eddie S. Glaude
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Church ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
Black Liberation Theology ◽  
Black Life

The political dimension is important to any understanding of the modern phase of African American Christianity, and it is clearly expressed in the explosion of civic and religious energy in the middle of the twentieth century that fundamentally transformed the United States. ‘African American Christianity: The Modern Phase (1935–1980)’ describes the civil rights movement and the important role that black churches played. Martin Luther King Jr. drew on the language of the black church in his public ministry. Womanist theologies, James Cone's black liberation theology, and the centrality of black Christianity to the civil rights movement demonstrate how the social and political circumstances of black life shaped the form and content of black Christian expression in the United States.

scholarly journals Urban specters

2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110302
Author(s):  
Asha Best ◽  
Margaret M Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spatial Method ◽  
Urban Futures ◽  
Black Life ◽  
The Relationship

In this piece, we take up haunting as a spatial method to consider what geography can learn from ghosts. Following Avery Gordon’s theorizations of haunting as a sociological method, a consideration of the spectral offers a means of reckoning with the shadows of social life that are not always readily apparent. Drawing upon art installations in Brooklyn, NY, White Shoes (2012–2016), and Oakland, CA, House/Full of BlackWomen (2015–present), we find that in both installations, Black women artists perform hauntings, threading geographies of race, sex, and speculation across past and present. We observe how these installations operate through spectacle, embodiment, and temporal disjuncture, illuminating how Black life and labor have been central to the construction of property and urban space in the United States. In what follows, we explore the following questions: what does haunting reveal about the relationship between property, personhood, and the urban in a time of racial banishment? And the second, how might we think of haunting as a mode of refusing displacement, banishment, and archival erasure as a way of imagining “livable” urban futures in which Black life is neither static nor obsolete?

scholarly journals African American Women and Domestic Violence: Addressing their Voice of Silence

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernice Kennedy ◽  
Chalice Rhodes (Former Jenkins)
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Domestic Violence ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Slave Owner ◽  
American Women ◽  
Strong Black Women

Abstract Historically, during slavery, the international slave trade promoted normalization of violence against African American women. During slavery, African American women endured inhuman conditions because of the majority race views of them as being over-sexualized, physically strong, and immoral. This perception of the African American women as being highly sexual and more sexual than white women results in slave owner justifying their sexual violation and degrading of the African American women. The stereotypical representations of African American women as strong, controlling, dangerous, fearless, and invulnerable may interfere with the African American women receiving the needed services for domestic violence in the community. The Strong Black Women Archetype has been dated back to slavery describing their coping mechanism in dealing with oppression by developing a strong, less traditionally female role. The authors developed a model: The Multidimensional Perspectives of Factors Contributing to Domestic Violence of African American Women in the United States. This model depicts historically, the factors contributing to domestic violence of African American women in the United States. Also, this model addressed the African American women subscribing to the Strong Black Women Archetype to cope with domestic violence. Despite the increase in domestic violence in African American women, they focused more on the issue of racism instead of sexism in America. African American women have experienced the two obstacles of racism and sexism in America. However, African American women and men believe racism is more critical than sexism. Therefore, domestic violence in the African American population may remain silent because of cultural loyalty. However, the voice of silence of African American females is gradually changing with the upcoming generations.

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.

Creating LDF South

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Rosen ◽  
Joseph Mosnier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Firm ◽  
Legal Aid ◽  
To Come ◽  
Washington University

This chapter describes Chambers's creation of a black-led and racially integrated law firm, for all intents the first such institution in the United States. In 1967, Chambers recruited two junior attorneys to his office: Adam Stein, a white George Washington University Law School graduate who had interned with Chambers in the summer of 1965, and James Ferguson, an African American from Asheville, North Carolina, who had just graduated from Columbia Law School. The three would form the nucleus of a powerful civil rights law practice for years to come. In 1968, after recruiting a young white Legal Aid attorney, James Lanning, Chambers formally created Chambers, Stein, Ferguson & Lanning. In 1969, African American attorney Robert Belton, a North Carolina native who was LDF's leading Title VII litigator, also joined the firm. So highly reputed was Chambers as a civil rights litigator, and so central was his firm to the wider LDF campaign in these years, that the firm was informally acknowledged as "LDF South."

“Look!! Look!!! at This!!!!”: The Radical Typography of David Walker's Appeal

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcy J. Dinius
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
The World ◽  
Printed Word

From the first publication of David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in 1829 through its incorporation into the contemporary literary canon, readers have recognized it as a fiery indictment of slavery and of the contradictions in Christianity and in the United States' founding. Yet the striking typography of Walker's Appeal has become invisible in our critical focus on the text's relation to African American oratory and even in considerations of the pamphlet's significance in early black print culture. An analysis of this graphic text reveals how it materially registers Walker's impassioned voice and argument and how it visually directs readers to voice his call to the illiterate. Walker attempts to resolve the opposition of the spoken and the printed word by exploiting his text's typography.

American Opposition to South African Apartheid

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Hostetter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
Economic Sanctions ◽  
The United States ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Apartheid Regime

American activists who challenged South African apartheid during the Cold War era extended their opposition to racial discrimination in the United States into world politics. US antiapartheid organizations worked in solidarity with forces struggling against the racist regime in South Africa and played a significant role in the global antiapartheid movement. More than four decades of organizing preceded the legislative showdown of 1986, when a bipartisan coalition in Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto, to enact economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Adoption of sanctions by the United States, along with transnational solidarity with the resistance to apartheid by South Africans, helped prompt the apartheid regime to relinquish power and allow the democratic elections that brought Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress to power in 1994. Drawing on the tactics, strategies and moral authority of the civil rights movement, antiapartheid campaigners mobilized public opinion while increasing African American influence in the formulation of US foreign policy. Long-lasting organizations such as the American Committee on Africa and TransAfrica called for boycotts and divestment while lobbying for economic sanctions. Utilizing tactics such as rallies, demonstrations, and nonviolent civil disobedience actions, antiapartheid activists made their voices heard on college campuses, corporate boardrooms, municipal and state governments, as well as the halls of Congress. Cultural expressions of criticism and resistance served to reinforce public sentiment against apartheid. Novels, plays, movies, and music provided a way for Americans to connect to the struggles of those suffering under apartheid. By extending the moral logic of the movement for African American civil rights, American anti-apartheid activists created a multicultural coalition that brought about institutional and governmental divestment from apartheid, prompted Congress to impose economic sanctions on South Africa, and increased the influence of African Americans regarding issues of race and American foreign policy.

Mortality, Incarceration, and African American Disenfranchisement in the Contemporary United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cottrell ◽  
Michael C. Herron ◽  
Javier M. Rodriguez ◽  
Daniel A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Right

On account of poor living conditions, African Americans in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of mortality and incarceration compared with Whites. This has profoundly diminished the number of voting-eligible African Americans in the country, costing, as of 2010, approximately 3.9 million African American men and women the right to vote and amounting to a national African American disenfranchisement rate of 13.2%. Although many disenfranchised African Americans have been stripped of voting rights by laws targeting felons and ex-felons, the majority are literally “missing” from their communities due to premature death and incarceration. Leveraging variation in gender ratios across the United States, we show that missing African Americans are concentrated in the country’s Southeast and that African American disenfranchisement rates in some legislative districts lie between 20% and 40%. Despite the many successes of the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights movement, high levels of African American disenfranchisement remain a continuing feature of the American polity.

Principled Disobedience

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Candice Delmas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
The United States ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Public Understanding ◽  
The Status

Chapter 1 surveys the literature on civil disobedience and places the author’s own approach to resistance and principled disobedience within this context. Public understanding of civil disobedience is the product of two different strands: the broadly Rawlsian philosophical conception of civil disobedience and the official narrative of the civil rights movement in the United States. This chapter calls upon history to show how the standard, broadly Rawlsian conception of civil disobedience (though not necessarily Rawls’s own) rests on an unrealistic and objectionable reading of the African American civil rights struggle. It also argues that the official reading of the civil rights movement functions as a counter-resistance ideology, deterring any form of protest against the status quo. It then examines and critiques recent “inclusive” accounts of civil disobedience, proposing instead a broad matrix of resistance that includes lawful acts of resistance and principled—civil and uncivil—disobedience.

THE HISTORY AND PROGRESS OF BLACK CITIZENSHIP

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 267-277
Author(s):  
Leah Wright Rigueur ◽  
Anna Beshlian
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black People ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
The United States ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Strategic Approach ◽  
Black Life ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThis paper offers a broad overview of Black citizenship within the United States, concentrating on the major shifts in Black life that have transpired since the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We examine several critical aspects of Black citizenship including economic status, education, criminal justice and mass incarceration, and political participation. Our report reveals that Black progress toward equal citizenship is inconsistent at best; at worst, it is stagnant and at times, regressive. As such, we conclude that dramatic solutions beyond traditional reformist approaches are needed in order to realize genuine citizenship and equal rights for Black people within the United States. In closing, we briefly highlight a specific example of a strategic approach to advancing substantive social and political change.

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