scholarly journals Building intellectual bridges: from African studies and African American studies to Africana studies in the United States

Afrika Focus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-31
Author(s):  
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
American Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
African American Studies ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Africana Studies

The study of Africa and its peoples in the United States has a complex history. It has involved the study of both an external and internal other, of social realities in Africa and the condition of people• of African descent in the United States. This paper traces and examines the complex intellectual, institutional, and ideological histories and intersections of African studies and African American studies. It argues that the two fields were founded by African American scholar activists as part of a Pan-African project before their divergence in the historically white universities after World War II in the maelstrom of decolonization in Africa and civil rights struggles in the United States. However, from the late 1980s and 1990s, the two fields began to converge, a process captured in the development of what has been called Africana studies. The factors behind this are attributed to both demographic shifts in American society and the academy including increased African migrations in general and of African academics in particular fleeing structural adjustment programs that devastated African universities, as well as the emergence of new scholarly paradigms especially the field of diaspora studies. The paper concludes with an examination of the likely impact of the Obama era on Africana studies.

scholarly journals Building intellectual bridges: from African studies and African American studies to Africana studies in the United States

Afrika Focus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
American Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
African American Studies ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Africana Studies

The study of Africa and its peoples in the United States has a complex history. It has involved the study of both an external and internal other, of social realities in Africa and the condition of people of African descent in the United States. This paper traces and examines the complex intellectual, institutional, and ideological histories and intersections of African studies and African American studies. It argues that the two fields were founded by African American scholar activists as part of a Pan-African project before their divergence in the historically white universities after World War II in the maelstrom of decolonization in Africa and civil rights struggles in the United States. However, from the late 1980s and 1990s, the two elds began to converge, a process captured in the development of what has been called Africana studies. The factors behind this are attributed to both demographic shifts in American society and the academy including increased African migrations in general and of African academics in particular fleeing structural adjustment programs that devastated African universities, as well as the emergence of new scholarly paradigms especially the field of diaspora studies. The paper concludes with an examination of the likely impact of the Obama era on Africana studies. Key words: African studies, African American studies, African diaspora studies, Africana studies 

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."

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.

Post-1965 Changes in Asian America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Hinnershitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian Immigrants ◽  
World War ◽  
Chinese Exclusion ◽  
The 1960S

After World War II and through the 1960s, Asian Americans began a transformative process, from being the “yellow peril” to becoming the model minority, and Asian Americans in the South experienced, to some degree, the same transformation. The war and its mottos of fighting for freedom and democracy at home and abroad affected the way Americans viewed their own hypocrisy toward minorities in the United States. African Americans were the largest minority group to use the aims of the war to demand attention to their plight with Jim Crow, prompting the growth of a nationwide civil rights movement, but Americans also came to view the century-old forms of legal discrimination against Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in a new light. Not only did Congress repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 (making it legal for some Chinese to naturalize and allowing a small number of Chinese immigrants to enter the United States), but Filipino Americans and Indian Americans received similar treatment during and after World War II. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act (or the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952), although designed to protect American security during the early Cold War by prohibiting and deporting subversive aliens, also made it possible for Asian immigrants of all ethnicities to become American citizens (while the number of Asians admitted to the United States did not drastically increase). Americans also viewed the ability of Japanese Americans to overcome the massive civil rights violations of wartime imprisonment and achieve economic and educational success as a model for all minorities to follow. Asian Americans came through the fires of World War II and proved that they were loyal Americans and deserving of equal treatment and respect, and while more subtle and sometimes not so subtle forms of racism and discrimination ...

Red Summer and Early 20th-Century Race Massacres

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann V. Collins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Early 19Th Century

Between the turbulent months of April and October 1919, racial violence reached a peak in the United States. Some twenty-six white-on-black massacres took place across the country. Author and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson dubbed this terrible period the Red Summer as a way to characterize pervasive racial hostility and for the blood spilled in its wake. Yet, racial violence has had a long and painful history in the United States. From the moment enslaved Africans arrived in the New World, whites strove cruelly and systematically to maintain power and control over their bodies and labor. Indeed, many interactions between ostensible racial groups have centered on white hostility. A type of brutality that proved especially vicious took the shape of white-on-black race massacres. First appearing in the early 19th century and fading by the end of World War II, whites used these types of disturbances to deny African Americans progress and freedom. Destruction of black communities, massive bloodshed, and lynchings characterized these occurrences. The early 20th century, and particularly the Red Summer, marked a critical moment in the history of race relations of the United States—one that proved deadly to African Americans.

United States

2019 ◽  
pp. 346-353
Author(s):  
David Sorkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Defense ◽  
American Jews ◽  
World War ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter looks at how the Great Migration from eastern Europe made the United States a center of world Jewry. The Nazis' murder of most of European Jewry magnified that status. While the migrants and their children were citizens, their rights were restricted. Thus, in the period after World War II, American Jewry's civil defense organizations engaged in a concerted emancipation campaign. Jews collaborated with African Americans, Catholics, and other minorities to end inequality. That campaign succeeded: from the 1940s to the 1960s, state and federal civil rights laws, and court rulings prohibiting discrimination, dismantled the structure of inequality. Those events constituted American Jews' second emancipation: it positioned the immigrant's children and grandchildren to realize the promise of American equality.

The FBI Helped to Define the Twentieth-Century Black Atlantic, Both Blocking and Forcing Its Flows

F.B. Eyes ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
World War ◽  
Black Transnationalism ◽  
The Mind

This part marshals the largely uncompiled evidence of FBI author files to suggest that the worst suspicions about the stakeout of Paris noir were basically correct—that Wright was not too wrong, it follows, when he darkly joked that any African American “who is not paranoid is in serious shape,” at least if he or she sought literary license outside the United States during the Hoover era. Two decades before American involvement in World War II opened the floodgates of black Paris, the FBI began to influence the movements of expatriate Afro-modernists—this even as it manipulated “lit.-cop federalism” to nationalize itself in the mind of white America. In the French capital of black transnationalism, and satellites beyond, FBI agents and informers kept tabs on a network of black literary travelers they hoped to link by the vulnerabilities of statelessness alone. Thus, this book's fourth thesis: The FBI helped to define the twentieth-century Black Atlantic, both blocking and forcing its flows.

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