Black Response to the Construction of Colored Huntington, West Virginia, during the Jim Crow Era

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Cicero M. Fain
Keyword(s):  
West Virginia ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Jim Crow Era

Black Huntington

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cicero M., III Fain
Keyword(s):  
West Virginia ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The State ◽  
Ohio River ◽  
Black Professionals ◽  
Black Migrants ◽  
Black Institutions ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
Generational Transition

This book studies the multi-generational transition of rural and semi-rural southern black migrants to life in the embryonic urban-industrial town of Huntington, West Virginia, between 1871 and 1929. Strategically located adjacent to the Ohio River in the Tri-state region of southwestern West Virginia, southeastern Ohio, and eastern Kentucky, and founded as a transshipment station by financier Collis P. Huntington for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in 1871, Huntington grew from a non-descript village to the state’s most populated city by 1930. Huntington’s black population grew in concert: by 1930, the city’s black population comprised the second largest in the state, behind Charleston, the state capital. The urbanization process posed different challenges, burdens, and opportunities to the black migrant than those migrating to the rural-industrial southern West Virginia coal mines. Direct and intensive supervision marked the urban industrial workplace, unlike the autonomy black coal miners’ experienced in the mines. Forced to navigate the socioeconomic and political constraints and dynamics of Jim Crow Era dictates, what state officials euphemistically termed, “benevolent segregation,” Huntington’s black migrants made remarkable strides. In the quest to transition from slave to worker to professional, Huntington’s black migrants forged lives, raised families, build black institutions, purchased property, and become black professionals. This study centers the criticality of their efforts to Huntington’s growth as a commercial, manufacturing, industrial, and cultural center.

Dismantling White Privilege: The Black Lives Matter Movement and Environmental Justice in Canada

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Teelucksingh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Jim Crow Era

On August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, alt-right/White supremacy groups and Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters came face-to-face regarding what to do about public monuments that celebrate key figures from slavery and the Jim Crow era. White supremacists and White nationalists did not hide their racist ideologies as they demanded that their privileged place in history not be erased. The BLM movement, which challenges state-sanctioned anti-Black racism, was ready to confront themes of White discontent and reverse racism, critiques of political correctness, and the assumption that racialized people should know their place and be content to be the subordinate other.It is easy to frame the events in Charlottesville as indicative of US-specific race problems. However, a sense that White spaces should prevail and an ongoing history of anti-Black racism are not unique to the United States. The rise of Canadian activism under the BLM banner also signals a movement to change Canadian forms of institutional racism in policing, education, and the labor market. This article responds to perceptions that the BLM movement has given insufficient attention to environmental concerns (Pellow 2016; Halpern 2017). Drawing on critical race theory as a conceptual tool, this article focuses on the Canadian context as part of the author’s argument in favor of greater collaboration between BLM and the environmental justice (EJ) movement in Canada. This article also engages with the common stereotype that Blacks in Canada have it better than Blacks in the United States.

Religion, Race, and Sports

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scholes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Baseball Player ◽  
Sports History ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
African American Race

Race, religion, and sports may seem like odd bedfellows, but, in fact, all three have been interacting with each other since the emergence of modern sports in the United States over a century ago. It was the sport of boxing that saw a black man become a champion at the height of the Jim Crow era and a baseball player who broke the color barrier two decades before the civil rights movement began. In this chapter, the role that religion has played in these and other instances where race (the African American race in particular) and sports have collided will be examined for its impact on the relationship between race and sports. The association of race, religion, and sports is not accidental. The chapter demonstrates that all three are co-constitutive of and dependent on each other for their meaning at these chosen junctures in American sports history.

Archival Enthusiasm

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-102
Author(s):  
Lindsay V. Reckson
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Political History ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Death Scene ◽  
Moving Body ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Enthusiasm

This chapter examines the ecstatic performances haunting Stephen Crane’s 1895 narrative of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage. While much has been made of the way the novel strategically “forgets” the political history of the war, this chapter analyzes the novel’s complex overlay of religious enthusiasm and minstrel performance, exploring how Red Badge deploys these forms in order to grapple with the embodied semiotics of the Jim Crow era. Recovering traces of the midcentury minstrel figure “Dandy Jim of Caroline” in Jim Conklin’s exuberant death scene, the chapter argues that the narrative afterlife of such traces reveals the novel’s tendency to simultaneously erase and embed the excesses of war and postwar racial violence. Marking the historical resonance between minstrelsy and religious enthusiasm in their objectification of the moving body, Red Badge’s performances treat bodies as kinetic archives, whose stylized gestures offer stunning testimony to history’s traumatic returns. In this sense, the novel treats the ambivalence of performance as precisely the arena in which literature might grapple with history’s unaccountable remainders.

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.

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