“Intruder of Color”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendra Taira Field
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Indian Territory ◽  
Indian Land ◽  
African American Father ◽  
Life Path

Chapter 1 documents the life path of Thomas Jefferson Brown, the son of an African-American father and Irish mother, who migrated from Arkansas to Indian Territory in the 1870s and married two African-descended women of the Creek and Seminole nations. This chapter uses Brown’s story to illustrate how some early African-American settlers initially bolstered their claims to freedom in the postemancipation era by attaching themselves to American expansion, Native Americans, and the acquisition of Indian land. This complex moment of African-American participation in the expropriation of Indian Territory was tellingly short-lived. African-American access to Indian land ended abruptly with the advent of Oklahoma statehood, Jim Crow segregation, and oil speculation. As Indian sovereignty was dissolved and notions of racial purity and “blood” acquired growing significance, “race” ultimately eclipsed “nation” as a guarantor of rights and resources. Brown’s story illuminates the construction of a new racial order in Indian Territory, and, ultimately, the limits of North American escape.

African American Boxer Billy Clarke in Modernizing Guatemala

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvis E. Dunn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
North American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Central American ◽  
Limiting Factor ◽  
Guatemala City ◽  
American Nation

In the final decades of the 19th century the Central American nation of Guatemala represented some intriguing employment and entrepreneurial possibilities from the point of view of US citizens. The lure of coffee cultivation, mahogany harvesting, even mining was real. Additionally, the promise of employment building an inter-oceanic railroad resulted in significant numbers of African Americans journeying to Guatemala. The relocation offered good pay and many apparently believed that it would also take them to a place where Jim Crow racism was not the predominant and limiting factor that it was in the United States. For at least one of those men however, railroad work was not the primary enticement to the region. By 1893, such alleged opportunities in Guatemala had attracted the black athlete, entrepreneur, and entertainer Billy A. Clarke. During his two years in the country, with his sometime business partner and sparring mate, Rod Lewis, also an African American, Clarke operated a gymnasium where he taught the “Art of Pugilism,” staged several prize fights, and, for a time, captured the imagination of the capital city with the example of modern, imported entertainment and professional sports. Between 1892 and 1898, Guatemala was ruled by, first president, and later, dictator, General José María Reina Barrios. A globalizer enamored of modernization, European architecture, and North American technology, the environment fostered by Reina Barrios attracted not only contractors and African American workers from the United States to build railroads but also other foreigners who made for the Central American nation, bringing the outside world to the mile-high capital of Guatemala City. Into this setting came Billy A. Clarke, drawn by the same baseline possibilities of solid work and the prospect of less Jim Crow as his African American railroad compatriots, but with the additional promise that his individual skills as a fighter and promoter might reap even bigger rewards. The story of Clarke in Guatemala is one of race, identity, and creative self-promotion. Building an image that combined ideas of the exotic and powerful African with ideas of the North American armed with “know-how” and scientific fighting skills, Clarke became a Guatemala City celebrity and was eventually known as the “Champion of Central America.”

“No Such Thing as Stand Still”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendra Taira Field
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
Indian Land ◽  
Mineral Rights ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Back To Africa

Chapter 4 recovers the origins of the little-known 1913–15 Chief Sam back-to-Africa movement and the lifelong migrants who created it. African-American access to Indian land ended abruptly after 1907 with the advent of Oklahoma statehood, Jim Crow segregation, and oil speculation. These migrants and many of their black and Indian counterparts lost their land and the associated mineral rights to white settlers and oil speculators through a combination of legal and extralegal exploitation. Thousands, including Coleman and Davis, joined Chief Alfred Sam’s 1914 “back-to-Africa” movement in hopes of claiming lasting freedom once and for all on the Gold Coast. This chapter employs the stories of Elic Davis and Monroe Coleman to show that this movement was not only prelude to Garveyism and the Great Migration, but capstone to “a century of negro migration.”

Race Making

2019 ◽  
pp. 33-56
Author(s):  
Monika Gosin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Interethnic Relations ◽  
Social Instability ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Interethnic Conflict ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Political Economic

Chapter 1 provides background for understanding the contentious interethnic relations explored in the book. It details Miami’s turbulent Jim Crow history, the historical forces that brought Cubans to Miami, and the clashes that would arise between white Anglos, Cubans, and African-Americans. The chapter illustrates how racist forces and ideologies of worthy citizenship imposed a strict separation between the categories of “African-American” and “Cuban,” and “black” and “white” in Miami, despite the actual heterogeneity of people placed in these categories. The chapter argues that three dominant race-making frames involved in the creation of worthy citizenship, traditionally utilized by whites to divide themselves from groups of color, become useful for racialized groups when they are faced with political, economic, and social instability. Using the case of Miami, the chapter illuminates how histories of white colonial and settler domination, and ideologies that justify such domination, are connected to interethnic conflict writ large.

Emancipation and Free African Americans

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Archer
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
African Descent ◽  
American Population ◽  
African American Population ◽  
Free African Americans

Except in parts of Rhode Island and Connecticut, slavery was a peripheral institution, and throughout New England during and after the Revolution there was widespread support to emancipate slaves. Some of the states enacted emancipation laws that theoretically allowed slavery to continue almost indefinitely, and slavery remained on the books as late as 1857 in New Hampshire. Although the laws gradually abolished slavery and although the pace was painfully slow for those still enslaved, the predominant dynamic for New England society was the sudden emergence of a substantial, free African American population. What developed was an even more virulent racism and a Jim Crow environment. The last part of the chapter is an analysis of where African Americans lived as of 1830 and the connection between racism and concentrations of people of African descent.

“The Dusky Doughboys”: Interaction between African American Soldiers and the Population of Northern Ireland during the Second World War

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 1131-1154 ◽  
Author(s):  
SIMON TOPPING
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Black Soldiers ◽  
American Military ◽  
The People ◽  
Second World

This article will examine the ways in which the people of Northern Ireland and African American troops stationed there during the Second World War reacted to each other. It will also consider the effect of institutional racism in the American military on this relationship, concluding that, for the most part, the population welcomed black soldiers and refused to endorse American racial attitudes or enforce Jim Crow segregation. This piece argues that, bearing in mind the latent racism of the time, the response of the Northern Irish to African Americans was essentially colour-blind, and this was true in both the Protestant and Catholic communities.

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.

scholarly journals Native Bondage, Narrative Mobility: African American Accounts of Indian Captivity

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
ASTRID HAAS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
North American ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
John Marrant

The article studies African American narratives of indigenous captivity from its emergence in the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Taking accounts by Briton Hammon, John Marrant, Henry Bibb, and James Beckwourth as examples, the essay charts the development of this body of writings, its distinction from white-authored narratives, and its contribution to North American autobiography. In so doing, the article argues that the black-authored texts strategically employed only certain elements of the Indian captivity narrative and that they blended these with aspects of other types of Western autobiography to claim black people's agency and discursive authority in white-dominated print culture.

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