The World of Hosea Easton and David Walker

Author(s):  
Richard Archer

Hosea Easton and David Walker described and analyzed racism in New England during the late 1820s. New England had initially been more receptive to its black population than were other sections of the United States, but as their populations of free people of African descent dramatically increased, states began to reverse themselves. By the 1820s, laws forbade free people of African descent from marrying whites, employment was limited to the most menial jobs, and education—where available—was inadequate. African Americans could not serve on juries or hold public office. Their housing opportunities were restricted, and they were segregated in church seating. They were barred from theaters, hotels, hospitals, stagecoaches, and steamships. Worst of all, whites denied blacks their humanity. Their belief that people of color were inferior to themselves underlay slavery and racism.

2021 ◽  
pp. 195-222
Author(s):  
Robert Murray

Chapter 5 examines the overwhelming rejection of colonization by free people of color in the United States, the evolution of the colonization societies, and the agency of the settlers in enacting these changes. For the majority of African Americans rejected colonization’s principal arguments. Those few who saw potential in Liberia emphasized the performative possibilities of the colony, the ability to act in ways previously denied to them on account of race. Significantly, the small number of African Americans who willingly chose to emigrate to Liberia were often racially ambiguous. They saw opportunity in the undefined and evolving racial identities offered by moving to Liberia. The chapter also examines the settlers’ roles in changing the colonization societies. For many settlers, there was no difference between abolition and colonization. Settlers worked with colonizationists committed to black uplift and attempted to drive out those who did not favor such reforms; they changed how the societies’ governed their colonies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-38
Author(s):  
Gabriela Vargas-Cetina ◽  
Manpreet Kaur Kang

The world in which we live is crisscrossed by multiple flows of people, information, non-human life, travel circuits and goods. At least since the Sixteenth Century, the Americas have received and generated new social, cultural and product trends. As we see through the case studies presented here, modern literature and dance, the industrialization of food and the race to space cannot be historicized without considering the role the Americas, and particularly the United States, have played in all of them. We also see, at the same time, how these flows of thought, art, science and products emerged from sources outside the Americas to then take root in and beyond the United States. The authors in this special volume are devising conceptual tools to analyze this multiplicity across continents and also at the level of particular nations and localities. Concepts such as cosmopolitanism, translocality and astronoetics are brought to shed light on these complex crossings, giving us new ways to look at the intricacy of these distance-crossing flows. India, perhaps surprisingly, emerges as an important cultural interlocutor, beginning with the idealized, imagined versions of Indian spirituality that fueled the romanticism of the New England Transcendentalists, to the importance of Indian dance pioneers in the world stage during the first part of the twentieth century and the current importance of India as a player in the race to space. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 1081 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihail Zilbermint ◽  
Fady Hannah-Shmouni ◽  
Constantine Stratakis

Hypertension is the leading cause of cardiovascular disease in the United States, affecting up to one-third of adults. When compared to other ethnic or racial groups in the United States, African Americans and other people of African descent show a higher incidence of hypertension and its related comorbidities; however, the genetics of hypertension in these populations has not been studied adequately. Several genes have been identified to play a role in the genetics of hypertension. They include genes regulating the renin-aldosterone-angiotensin system (RAAS), such as Sodium Channel Epithelial 1 Beta Subunit (SCNN1B), Armadillo Repeat Containing 5 (ARMC5), G Protein-Coupled Receptor Kinase 4 (GRK4), and Calcium Voltage-Gated Channel Subunit Alpha1 D (CACNA1D). In this review, we focus on recent genetic findings available in the public domain for potential differences between African Americans and other populations. We also cover some recent and relevant discoveries in the field of low-renin hypertension from our laboratory at the National Institutes of Health. Understanding the different genetics of hypertension among various groups is essential for effective precision-guided medical therapy of high blood pressure.


Author(s):  
Tyina Steptoe

During the 20th century, the black population of the United States transitioned from largely rural to mostly urban. In the early 1900s the majority of African Americans lived in rural, agricultural areas. Depictions of black people in popular culture often focused on pastoral settings, like the cotton fields of the rural South. But a dramatic shift occurred during the Great Migrations (1914–1930 and 1941–1970) when millions of rural black southerners relocated to US cities. Motivated by economic opportunities in urban industrial areas during World Wars I and II, African Americans opted to move to southern cities as well as to urban centers in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. New communities emerged that contained black social and cultural institutions, and musical and literary expressions flourished. Black migrants who left the South exercised voting rights, sending the first black representatives to Congress in the 20th century. Migrants often referred to themselves as “New Negroes,” pointing to their social, political, and cultural achievements, as well as their use of armed self-defense during violent racial confrontations, as evidence of their new stance on race.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asma Afsaruddin

These words of John Lewis represent a scathing criticism of the contemporary failures of the United States, the oldest and possibly most vibrant democratic nation-state in the world. The words also express a deep disappointment that the principles of equality and justice enshrined in the US constitution have been honored more in the breach when they pertain to African-Americans, many of whose ancestors arrived on these shores long before those of their Euro-American compatriots.


Author(s):  
Richard T. Hughes

The American myth of Nature’s Nation claims that the United States, and especially its founding documents, owe nothing to human history but reflect the natural order as it came from the hands of the Creator. Accordingly, the Declaration of Independence speaks of “self-evident truths,” rooted in “Nature and Nature’s God.” But the founders read into the natural order the long-standing myth of White Supremacy. In this way, the myth of Nature’s Nation became a tool for exclusion and oppression of people of color. In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Thomas Jefferson even argued that black inferiority was nature’s own decree. From an early date, blacks fought back. David Walker led that charge with his 1829 book, Walker’s Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World. In the twenty-first century, other black writers—especially Toni Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates—unmasked the ways in which the myth of White Supremacy is embedded in the American myth of Nature’s Nation.


Author(s):  
Cati Coe

Most of the African research participants in northern New Jersey and the Washington DC metropolitan area told stories of deliberate humiliation or diminishment in which their place of origin or Blackness was used against them. Through these interactions and stories about these interactions, African care workers were becoming familiar with American racial categories, in which they were Black, mixed in with stereotypes about Africans as non-human and about immigrants stealing jobs from citizens. These insults incorporated them into American racial categories as “Blacks” and “people of color,” social categories of person that made little sense in their home countries. As a result, African care workers were becoming more sensitive to the experiences of African-Americans. Care workers take stories of racism to be paradigmatic of their experiences in the United States.


Author(s):  
Richard Archer

There was no straight line from a racist society to one that supported full equality, and there was no guarantee that a right established one year could not be changed the next. That rang true in the United States and particularly in New England following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. This chapter analyzes the four most important fugitive slave cases of the region: William and Ellen Craft, Frederick Minkins, Thomas Sims, and Anthony Burns. The result of those cases—two successful, two not—was a change in New England. Antislavery became socially acceptable, and there was an increased willingness among white New Englanders to accept the equal rights of African Americans. But racism hadn't died. What was different were attitudes about New England and about the slave South. In the short term black New Englanders benefited, but there were limits to progress.


Author(s):  
Delores M. Walters

This introductory chapter focuses on Margaret Garner's story. In 1856, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter and attempted to kill her other three children rather than see them returned to slavery. Her act of infanticide represents the most drastic and extreme form of woman-centered resistance to the brutality of slavery. As such, Garner's desperate solution to “save” her children continues to capture people's interest. Her story symbolizes the impossible choices that were forced upon African Americans burdened by the institution of slavery. It is also relevant to present-day women's resistance to intimate partner violence. Indeed, the theme of women and violence is a continuing reality in the United States and the world.


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