Sheep Hill Memories, Carver Dreams: Creating a Living Newspaper Today

2004 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Browder
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Community Organization ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Virginia Commonwealth University ◽  
American Working Class ◽  
The University ◽  
Class Community ◽  
The Way

In November 2000, the living newspaper drama Sheep Hill Memories, Carver Dreams premiered to packed houses at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond. This documentary play concerns the history and survival of Carver, a historically African- American working-class community bordering VCU which was being threatened by the university’s planned expansion. Performed by a Carver-based theater group with a twenty-seven-year history, in collaboration with TheatreVCU, Sheep Hill Memories, Carver Dreams was the outcome of a two-year collaboration between a grass-roots community organization and the university. As playwright and co-director of the two-year Carver Living Newspaper Project, I present the development of the project, its outcomes, and the challenges we faced along the way in creating the play.

Interpreting Paul Oliver

Popular Music ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (01) ◽  
pp. 128-133
Author(s):  
David Horn
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
80Th Birthday ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Research Subject ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Working Class

When the English blues scholar Paul Oliver, who died in 2017 aged 90, was interviewed for a special issue of Popular Music in his honour, on the occasion of his 80th birthday (issue 26/1, January 2007), it was striking how much of the conversation revolved around a recurring flow of ideas for future research, to be undertaken by him or by anyone else who came with credentials appropriate to the enterprise (such as musicology, a discipline that he never considered himself well enough versed in to allow engagement). It didn't enter his mind that he might become a research subject himself. Now, with Christian O'Connell's book, he has; and it is his own methods that are under scrutiny, not, or not directly, the blues that he spent a long adult lifetime investigating (and for which he was such a knowledgeable and, for many who read his books or heard him speak live or on air, inspiring advocate), nor the social and economic life of the African American working class who created the music that continued to fascinate him. What is under the microscope is how he depicted both of those things.

African-American Strikebreaking from the Civil War to the New Deal

1993 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 525-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren C. Whatley
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
European American ◽  
Labor Strikes ◽  
Ethnic Stratification ◽  
American Working Class ◽  
Political Economic

When African-American workers broke labor strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were acting in opposition to established social norms concerning race, class, community, and the state. Imagine platoons of African-American men who ordinarily lacked protection of their most basic civil rights escorted by police into a hostile European-American community to take the jobs of European-American workers who were expressing their working-class consciousness through a labor union that excluded their fellow African-American workers. Scholars have interpreted African-American strikebreaking as an example of the ethnic stratification characteristic of the American working class (Bonacich 1976; Gutman 1962, 1987; Foner and Lewis 1979, 1980; Spero and Harris 1931). What was its political-economic context? That is the central question of this essay.

Inflation, democracy, and populism

2018 ◽  
pp. 139-176
Author(s):  
Thomas Docherty
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Actual Working ◽  
The People ◽  
The University ◽  
The Way

The crisis in higher education is also simultaneously a crisis in constitutional democracies; and the two are intimately linked. The corruption of language that shapes managerialist discourse enables a corruption in the communications among citizens that are vital in any democracy. Democracy becomes recast first as an alleged ‘will of the people’, but a will whose semantic content is prone to political manipulation. In turn this opens the way to a validation of demagogic populism that masquerades as democracy when it is in fact the very thing that undermines democracy. When the University sector becomes complicit with this – as it is in our times – then it engages in a fundamental betrayal of the actual people in the society it claims to serve. Populism thrives on the celebration of anti-intellectual ignorance and the contempt for expertise, preferring instead the supposedly more ‘natural’ claims of instinctive faith over reason. Lurking within this is a form of class warfare that treats real and actual working class life as contemptible.

The Crisis of the Black Worker, the U.S. Labor Movement, and Democracy for All

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 396-402
Author(s):  
Augustus C. Wood
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Black Worker ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Socioeconomic Condition ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
American Working Class ◽  
The U.S

This paper contextualizes the socioeconomic condition of the African-American working class in the American Labor Movement. As the union movement continues its steady decline, African-American social conditions are deteriorating at an alarming pace. Racial oppression disrupted historically powerful labor movements as African-Americans served in predominantly subproletariat labor positions. As a result, Black workers endured the racially oppressive U.S. structure on the periphery of the U.S. Labor Movement. I argue that Black working-class social conditions are dialectically related to their subjugated position in the modern-day union movement. Therefore, for Black social conditions and working-class conditions to improve overall, the union movement must centralize the conditions of the Black workers.

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