Duty Beyond the Battlefield: African American Soldiers Fight For Racial Uplift, Citizenship, and Manhood, 1870–1920

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P Kilroy
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
African American Soldiers

Determination and Persistence: Building the African American Teacher Corps through Summer and Intermittent Teaching, 1860s-1890s

2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-34
Author(s):  
Michael Fultz
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
African American ◽  
Teaching Practices ◽  
African American Youth ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Family Resources ◽  
Student Activities ◽  
American Students ◽  
Youth And Young Adults ◽  
American Teacher

This paper explores trends in summer and intermittent teaching practices among African American students in the post-Civil War South, focusing on student activities in the field, the institutions they attended, and the communities they served. Transitioning out of the restrictions and impoverishment of slavery while simultaneously seeking to support themselves and others was an arduous and tenuous process. How could African American youth and young adults obtain the advanced education they sought while sustaining themselves in the process? Individual and family resources were limited for most, while ambitions, both personal and racial, loomed large. Teaching, widely recognized as a means to racial uplift, was the future occupation of choice for many of these students.

African American Soldiers in World War I

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda M. Nagel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Military Service ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
War Effort ◽  
African American Soldiers ◽  
First World

In the midst of the long black freedom struggle, African American military participation in the First World War remains central to civil rights activism and challenges to systems of oppression in the United States. As part of a long and storied tradition of military service for a nation that marginalized and attempted to subjugate a significant portion of US citizens, African American soldiers faced challenges, racism, and segregation during the First World War simultaneously on the home front and the battlefields of France. The generations born since the end of the Civil War continually became more and more militant when resisting Jim Crow and insisting on full, not partial, citizenship in the United States, evidenced by the events in Houston in 1917. Support of the war effort within black communities in the United States was not universal, however, and some opposed participation in a war effort to “make the world safe for democracy” when that same democracy was denied to people of color. Activism by organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) challenged the War Department’s official and unofficial policy, creating avenues for a larger number of black officers in the US Army through the officers’ training camp created in Des Moines, Iowa. For African American soldiers sent to France with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), the potential for combat experience led to both failures and successes, leading to race pride as in the case of the 93rd Division’s successes, and skewed evidence for the War Department to reject increasing the number of black officers and enlisted in the case of the 92nd Division. All-black Regular Army regiments, meanwhile, either remained in the United States or were sent to the Philippines rather than the battlefields of Europe. However, soldiers’ return home was mixed, as they were both celebrated and rejected for their service, reflected in both parades welcoming them home and racial violence in the form of lynchings between December 1918 and January 1920. As a result, the interwar years and the start of World War II roughly two decades later renewed the desire to utilize military service as a way to influence US legal, social, cultural, and economic structures that limited African American citizenship.

Race Doesn’t Matter

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey D. Fields
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Abstract Notion

This chapter focuses on African American Republicans who can be labeled as “color-blind” because their strategy for linking black identity to Republican politics involves de-emphasizing the role of race in black people's lives. These African American Republicans see themselves as linked to a broader black community, but they reject identity politics as the pathway to racial uplift. They endorse Republican social policy as part of a commitment to an abstract notion of conservative politics, not because the policies are good for black people. Indeed, for race-blind African American Republicans, the best thing for blacks is to abandon race-based identity politics.

“A Ghost of the Future”: Racial (Mis)perception and Black Subjectivity in LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Bunch Davis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Subjectivity ◽  
The Future ◽  
White Femininity ◽  
The Right

This chapter offers a reading of Amiri Baraka's 1964 play, Dutchman, focusing on its use of race icons to engage with white liberal response to racial uplift ideology and its implications for black subjectivity. The chapter considers Rashid Johnson's restaging of Dutchman and his assertion that his project creates an opportunity to find identity somewhere between “the narrative of struggle and the narrative of Negro Exceptionalism,” noting that it resonates in Baraka's (aka LeRoi Jones) contention that the struggle is as much about “the right to choose.” The chapter challenges claims that Dutchman relies upon essentialized blackness and the degradation of white femininity in order to prop up the identity of the African American protagonist, Clay. Instead, it argues that the play unpacks whiteness's investment in uplift ideology by employing a variety of cultural genealogies and practices to sketch identity, thus exposing the vulnerabilities of the African American Freedom Struggle era iterations of uplift ideology.

Worse Than Murder

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-167
Author(s):  
David Silkenat
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Soldiers

This chapter compares how Ulysses S. Grant and Nathan Bedford Forrest used surrender. While Forrest demanded surrender and threatened a massacre if refused, Grant saw surrender as an opportunity to prevent bloodshed. The chapter includes discussion of unconditional surrender and the massacre of African American soldiers at Fort Pillow.

Becoming Barthé

2020 ◽  
pp. 183-204
Author(s):  
Margaret Rose Vendryes
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
African Art ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Alain Locke

This chapter covers the decisive six years, in Chicago, when sculptor James Richmond Barthé (1901-1989) became an artist and a contributor to racial uplift. His faith in racial integration is reflected in work that merges European tradition with African American bodies. Barthé used the accessibility of naturalism to highlight the dynamism of blackness in his era. In 1927, The Negro in Art Week, Barthé’s professional debut, was organized by the Chicago Woman’s Club, the Chicago Art League and The Art Institute of Chicago. This exhibition introduced Barthé to his peers, competitors, African art, and his mentor Alain Locke. His figure, Tortured Negro, an unprecedented black male nude, was the first of Barthé’s many beautiful and coded sculptures. He invented himself and his art in Chicago.

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