James McCune Smith Predicted African American Preeminence in U.S. Art and Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy M. Cools
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Descent ◽  
The United States ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Community Leader ◽  
Intellectual Community ◽  
The People ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
American Physician

James McCune Smith (1813–1865) was an African American physician, author, intellectual, community leader, and antislavery activist. He believed that the racial caste system of the United States was perpetuated not only by the slave system but by widely entrenched negative attitudes towards people of African descent, both outside and within the African American community. To counteract popular prejudice and to promote African American confidence and unity, he wrote widely on the abilities, accomplishments, and contributions of people of African descent, both historical and contemporary. This article examines McCune Smith’s theory that African Americans would play a formative and outsize role in the development of United States artistic and intellectual culture. From his time to ours, McCune Smith’s striking prediction was fulfilled to a degree that even he, inspired with the confidence his 1841 lecture “The Destiny of the People of Color” (published 1843) reveals, might marvel at.

Ora Dell Graham

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Wade
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Library Of Congress ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
The People ◽  
Tangible Evidence ◽  
Entire Nation

This chapter describes the recordings of Ora Dell Graham. In the fall of 1940, the year she turned twelve, Ora Dell stood before her classmates in her school auditorium. As John A. Lomax operated a disc recorder, she performed a handful of songs that she animated with dance steps, hand clapping, and vocal effects. Three of these numbers, along with the earliest published recordings of Muddy Waters, subsequently appeared on an album of African American blues and game songs issued by the Library of Congress. This news came as a surprise to her nephew, Sonny Milton. He then asked why anyone would care about a little black girl from Mississippi. The reason is that in November 1940, just three weeks after Ora Dell made her recordings, Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish summarized the Library's acquisition policy in the “Canons of Selection,”: “The Library of Congress should possess all books and other materials ... which express and record the life and achievements of the people of the United States.” The Library's canon embraced the entire nation, welcoming not only the papers of a president but the poetry of a schoolyard child. The recordings she made gave tangible evidence of this policy of inclusion.

African Studies, 1955–1975: an Afro-American Perspective

1976 ◽  
Vol 6 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 57-67
Author(s):  
Elliott P. Skinner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
African Descent ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Academic Interest ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
The People ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Unique Relationship

Afro-Americans have always had more than academic interest in the study of Africa; it was inevitable therefore that they would come into conflict with Euro-Americans who (through myopia or cunning) insisted that they had no unique relationship to Africa. Viewed in historical perspective, it is quite understandable why in the 1960s blacks would challenge those whites who had arrogated to themselves the control of African Studies in the United States. For blacks, parity (if not dominance), in the study of Africa is inextricably part of their struggle for full equality in America. The reasons for this are quite simple: the whites who conquered and settled America decided quite early that the people of African descent who were brought to these shores as captives could not and (later) should not be permitted to live on a plane of equality with them.

scholarly journals Of African Descent? Blackness and the Concept of Origins in Cultural Perspective

Genealogy ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Abel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Descent ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Television Documentary ◽  
Popular Television

Over the past decade, the DNA ancestry-testing industry—based largely in the United States—has experienced a huge upsurge in popularity, thanks partly to rapidly developing technologies and the falling prices of products. Meanwhile, the notion of “genetic genealogy” has been strongly endorsed by popular television documentary shows in the US, particularly vis-à-vis African-American roots-seekers—for whom these products are offered as a means to discover one’s ancestral “ethnic” origins, thereby “reversing the Middle Passage.” Yet personalized DNA ancestry tests have not had the same reception among people of African descent in other societies that were historically affected by slavery. This paper outlines and contextualizes these divergent responses by examining and comparing the cultural and political meanings that are attached to notions of origin, as well as the way that Blackness has been defined and articulated, in three different settings: the United States, France and Brazil.

African American Religion in the United States of America: An Interpretative Essay

2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles H. Long
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
African Descent ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Modern World ◽  
American Religion ◽  
African American Religion

This essay addresses the problematical nature of the meaning of religion as it is related to the formation and destiny of peoples of African descent in the United States. Moving beyond a narrow understanding of the nature of religion as expressed in much of Black Theology, for example, this essay proposes a "thick" and complex depiction of religion in the African American context through a recognition of its relationship to the contact and conquest that marked the modern world.

Populism and Liberal Democracy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takis S. Pappas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comprehensive Theory ◽  
The People ◽  
Original Definition ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Great Relevance ◽  
Definition Of

Based on an original definition of modern populism as “democratic illiberalism” and many years of meticulous research, Takis Pappas marshals extraordinary empirical evidence from Argentina, Greece, Peru, Italy, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, the United States, Spain, and Brazil to develop a comprehensive theory about populism. He addresses all key issues in the debate about populism and answers significant questions of great relevance for today’s liberal democracy, including: • What is modern populism and how can it be differentiated from comparable phenomena like nativism and autocracy? • Where in Latin America has populism become most successful? Where in Europe did it emerge first? Why did its rise to power in the United States come so late? • Is Trump a populist and, if so, could he be compared best with Venezuela’s Chávez, France’s Le Pens, or Turkey’s Erdoğan? • Why has populism thrived in post-authoritarian Greece but not in Spain? And why in Argentina and not in Brazil? • Can populism ever succeed without a charismatic leader? If not, what does leadership tell us about how to challenge populism? • Who are “the people” who vote for populist parties, how are these “made” into a group, and what is in their minds? • Is there a “populist blueprint” that all populists use when in power? And what are the long-term consequences of populist rule? • What does the expansion, and possibly solidification, of populism mean for the very nature and future of contemporary democracy? Populism and Liberal Democracy will change the ways the reader understands populism and imagines the prospects of liberal democracy.

Religion, Race, and Humanism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony B. Pinn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unitarian Universalist ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lorraine Hansberry

This chapter explores the history of humanism within African American communities. It positions humanist thinking and humanism-inspired activism as a significant way in which people of African descent in the United States have addressed issues of racial injustice. Beginning with critiques of theism found within the blues, moving through developments such as the literature produced by Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, to political activists such as W. E. B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph, to organized humanism in the form of African American involvement in the Unitarian Universalist Association, African Americans for Humanism, and so on, this chapter presents the historical and institutional development of African American humanism.

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