Creative Conflict in African American Thought: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey; Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture; Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era

2005 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-424
Author(s):  
I. Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Marcus Garvey ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
American Thought

Black “Crime,” Public Hysteria, and the Cinema of Containment: Black Cinema Aesthetics from Willie Dynamite to The Interrupters and a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Abugo Ongiri
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
Black Cinema ◽  
Black Subjectivity ◽  
Political Organizing

This essay will explore the ways in which African American visual culture has attempted to negotiate criminalization and the current situation of what Richard Iton rightfully characterizes as “hyperincarceration.” It will explore the ways in which contemporary African American visual culture is engaged in negotiating between the literal material realities and consequences of mass incarceration and aesthetic constructions of violence. While mass incarceration is increasingly becoming understood as “the New Jim Crow” for African American political organizing, Black criminality has become the key lens through which questions of masculinity, class exclusion, gender, and selfhood get negotiated in African American visual culture. This essay will argue that the “subtext of ongoing Black captivity” is the pretext for much of what drives Black action genres and African American representation in general as a key signifier of a racialized identity and as an indicator of a Black subjectivity fraught with complexities of non-belonging.

Eddie Anderson, Rochester, and Race in 1930s Radio and Film

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
Time Part

African-American dancer, singer, comedian Eddie Anderson pursued an entertainment career in California, his opportunities limited by Jim Crow-era racism in Hollywood but also shaped opportunities in night clubs and cabarets that catered to both black and white patrons. Winning an audition for a one-time role on Benny’s radio show, Anderson’s inimitable gravelly voice spurred Benny to create a full time part, the character of Rochester Van Jones, Jack’s butler and valet, in late 1937. Although initially hampered by stereotyped minstrel-show dialogue and character habits, Rochester soon became renowned by both white and black listeners for his ability to criticize the “Boss” in impertinent manner. Virtually co-starred in three films with Benny that were highly successful at the box office, commenters in the black press in 1940 hoped that Rochester offered “a new day” in improved race relations.

In Living Color: Early “Impressions” of Slavery and the Limits of Living History

2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1732-1748
Author(s):  
Drew Swanson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public History ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Living History ◽  
Mount Vernon ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Historical Sites ◽  
Embodied History

Abstract In the 1970s, American historical sites began to more thoroughly and critically interpret slavery’s history, with a few institutions employing living history as an interpretive form. At sites like Virginia’s Mount Vernon and Colonial Williamsburg, the hope is that these historical “impressions” will engage audiences with a more authentic or credible representation of racial bondage. An earlier wave of living historical representations of slavery suggest the challenges and hazards of embodied history, however. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a significant number of southern sites employed African American interpreters who claimed to have been born into slavery, often on the very sites where they were currently working. Historical attractions used the “authenticity” and “credibility” of these interpreters to advance the narrative of a happy Old South. Historians have noted these performances as part of the sectional reconciliation of the Jim Crow era, but have rarely interpreted them as public history. Although the contemporary living history of slavery has different—and far better—goals than impressions of a century past, this long history of embodied bondage suggests the implicit dangers of interpreting slavery and race through living people.

I Fight for a Living

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Moore
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Sporting Culture ◽  
Collective Group ◽  
White Manhood ◽  
Jim Crow Era

At its heart, I Fight for a Living is a book about black men who came of age in the Reconstruction and early Jim Crow era--a time when the remaking of white manhood was at its most intense, placing vigor and physicality at the center of the construction of manliness. The book uses the stories of black fighters’ lives, from 1880 to 1915, to explore how working-class black men used prizefighting and the sporting culture to assert their manhood in a country that denied their equality, and to examine the reactions by the black middle class and white middle class toward these black fighters. Through these stories, the book explores how the assertion of this working-class manliness confronted American ideas of race and manliness. While other works on black fighters have explored black boxers as individuals, this book seeks to study these men as a collective group while providing a localized and racialized response to black working-class manhood. It was a tough bargain to risk one’s body to prove manhood, but black men across the globe took that chance.

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