Exhibiting a New South Empire

Author(s):  
Nathan Cardon

Chapter 4 argues that the Jim Crow modernity at the fairs foreshadowed a Jim Crow empire after 1898. The Cotton States and International Exposition and Tennessee Centennial Exposition presented arguments for a distinctly southern imperial expansion. The Negro Buildings coupled with African American participation provided a blueprint for the incorporation of nonwhite colonial natives into the United States. By solving the supposed problems of a multiracial society by including the labor of African Americans while denying them the rights of citizenship, the South presented a framework for empire. At the same time, the exhibits and conferences held at the Negro Buildings often embraced the civilizing language of imperialism. Rhetoric about “primitive” and “heathen” Africans and the need for technical schools in Africa placed the southern African American professional and clerical staff within and alongside American expansionism.

Author(s):  
Anthony B. Pinn

This chapter explores the history of humanism within African American communities. It positions humanist thinking and humanism-inspired activism as a significant way in which people of African descent in the United States have addressed issues of racial injustice. Beginning with critiques of theism found within the blues, moving through developments such as the literature produced by Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, to political activists such as W. E. B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph, to organized humanism in the form of African American involvement in the Unitarian Universalist Association, African Americans for Humanism, and so on, this chapter presents the historical and institutional development of African American humanism.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
James B. Stewart

This article argues that contemporary antislavery activism in the United States is programmatically undermined and ethically compromised unless it is firmly grounded in a deep understanding of the African American past. Far too frequently those who claim to be “the new abolitionists” evince no interest in what the original abolitionist movement might have to teach them and seem entirely detached from a U.S. history in which the mass, systematic enslavement of African Americans and its consequences are dominating themes. As a result contemporary antislavery activism too often marginalizes the struggle for racial justice in the United States and even indulges in racist ideology. In an effort to overcome these problems, this article seeks to demonstrate in specific detail how knowledge of the African American past can empower opposition to slavery as we encounter it today.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 265
Author(s):  
Trent Shotwell

History of African Americans: Exploring Diverse Roots by Thomas J. Davis chronicles the remarkable past of African Americans from the earliest arrival of their ancestors to the election of President Barack Obama. This work was produced to recognize every triumph and tragedy that separates African Americans as a group from others in America. By distinguishing the rich and unique history of African Americans, History of African Americans: Exploring Diverse Roots provides an account of inspiration, courage, and progress. Each chapter details a significant piece of African American history, and the book includes numerous concise portraits of prominent African Americans and their contributions to progressing social life in the United States.


Circulation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 142 (Suppl_3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anas M Al Zubaidi ◽  
Graham Bevan ◽  
Mariam Rana ◽  
Abdul Rahman Al Armashi ◽  
Mustafa Alqaysi ◽  
...  

Background: African Americans are at increased risk of fatal cardiac arrests, but population-based studies exploring contemporary epidemiology are not available. We sought to identify the trend in race-specific mortality from cardiac arrest in the United States. Methods: Using the multiple cause of death database, we identified all patients (Caucasians or African Americans) who died of cardiac arrest (International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision code I46.x listed as underlying cause of death) between 1999 and 2018. Age-adjusted mortality rates were standardized to the 2000 US census data, and stratified by age group (<35 years, 35-64 years, and ≥ 65 years). Results: A total of 311,065 cardiac arrest deaths were identified, with an overall age-adjusted mortality of 53.6 per million (Caucasian: 49.1 per million, African American: 90.6 per million). Overall, age-adjusted mortality decreased from 80.1 per million persons (1999) to 44.3 per million persons (2012), followed by 8.8% increase to 48.2 (2018). Between 2012 and 2018, African Americans had higher rates of increase (10.9%) compared with Caucasians (6.9%). Largest disparities in relative changes between 2012 and 2018 occurred in patients younger than 35 years (African American: 35%, Caucasians -11%), and patients ≥ 65 years (African Americans: 8%, Caucasians 4%), figure. Conclusions: Although the mortality due to cardiac arrest has declined in the US between 1999 and 2012, a recent increase has been noted between 2012 and 2018, particularly among younger African Americans. Studies should focus on identifying causes of disparities and identifying methods to reduce the racial gap.


1995 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-23
Author(s):  
Immanuel Wallerstein

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the study of Africa in the United States was a very rare and obscure practice, engaged in almost exclusively by African-American (then called Negro) intellectuals. They published scholarly articles primarily in quite specialized journals, notably Phylon, and their books were never reviewed in the New York Times. As a matter of fact, at this time (that is, before 1945) there weren't even very many books written about African-Americans in the U.S., although the library acquisitions were not quite as rare as those for books about Africa.


2020 ◽  
pp. 145-167
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez

This chapter explores the life and work of Augustus Washington, the free African American photographer, who envisioned more rights and freedoms than those available in the United States. Anticipating a future in the United States bound by racial restraints, he packed up his successful photography studio in Hartford, Connecticut, and emigrated to Monrovia, Liberia. Washington worked closely with the American Colonization Society to convince black Americans to leave their homeland for Liberia and attempted to provoke viewers of his images to envision the potential of black rights in the United States that he enjoyed in Liberia. Washington’s images promulgating black Liberian political leadership and economic promise abroad offered a vision of freedom that belied a hierarchical, and often oppressive, Liberian society. In the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, his images brought into focus the debates among African Americans about the uncertain, and perhaps imperiled, future of black people in the United States.


2021 ◽  
pp. 86-114
Author(s):  
Julie Golia

This chapter examines the advice column “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise,” which ran in the Chicago Defender, one of the most successful black newspapers in the United States. In the early twentieth century, black publishers recognized the many ways that mainstream newspapers reinforced the racial status quo in America and failed to address the needs of African American readers. They also sought to offer more feature content to women readers. “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise” was one of the country’s most widely read black advice columns. Columnist Princess Mysteria, a vaudeville mentalist, embraced the Defender’s mission of racial “uplift” and advocacy. But her counsel also reflected a unique sensitivity to the dual prejudices that her female readers faced as African Americans and as women. The columnist offered a worldview very different from that of white columnists, one that doled out assertive, even feminist advice.


Author(s):  
Abraham Smith

The chapter explores the motivations for the use of the Christian Bible in distinctive temporal arcs within African American culture. Initially, the chapter acknowledges the oddity of an African American affinity with the Bible because that Bible was deployed to support the enslavement and perpetual exploitation of African descendants in the British colonies that later became the United States. Then, it articulates three reasons for the aforementioned affinity: the availability of the Bible (especially the King James Bible) to provide a language world for personal and collective expression; the versatility or pliability of the Bible in the imagination of African Americans as they repeatedly and creatively read their own identities through the struggles of the characters of the Bible; and the perceived persuasiveness of the Bible in some of the heated debates with which the larger US public has been engaged since its inception.


Author(s):  
Gerald Horne

This concluding chapter looks at Patterson's last years. As Patterson's lifespan wound down, it became evident that despite his association with a reviled organization, it was difficult to isolate him altogether, not only because of his track record, which inspired admiration, but also because many African Americans were not necessarily prone to bow to those who only recently had declared their unwavering support for Jim Crow. Thus, a man who made no secret of his desire for a revolutionary transformation of the United States—a nation where conservatism was ingrained—continued to win adherents even as his debilities mounted and his life was expiring. On March 5, 1980, at the age of eighty-nine, Patterson died at Union Hospital in the Bronx. Ultimately, Patterson left behind memories of a life of struggle shaped by an all-pervading hatred of Jim Crow and imperialism; more than that, he saw the path to socialism as paved by the struggle for democratic rights.


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