“Get Happy, All You Sinners”

2020 ◽  
pp. 47-77
Author(s):  
Vaughn A. Booker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Intimate Knowledge

This chapter discusses Cab Calloway’s articulation and portrait of irreverence as a distinctive mode of religious skepticism in African American religious history through his music and his 1976 autobiography, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me. His adolescent tensions with his respectable middle-class African American roots and religious upbringing shaped his early career, shedding light on the impactful presence of black men and women’s comedy that poked fun at African American religious life based on intimate familiarity with it. Comedic religious subjects generated a “knowing” laughter among African Americans with intimate knowledge of these irreverent caricatures because of their own experiences with religious life. Producing this laughter encouraged African Americans to embrace a kind of religious affiliation or participation that appreciated humor about matters that they had been instructed to treat with reverence. Through humor, irreverence oriented African Americans toward religious affiliation in ways that differed from radical humanist critiques of African American Protestant Christian theology and practice. In Cab Calloway’s early career, he made a concerted effort to produce humorous irreverence by replicating the sights, sounds, and behaviors of black Protestant church settings, characters, events, and experiences.

“Latter-Day Slavery”

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (4) ◽  
pp. 137-143
Author(s):  
Susan D. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Women's Suffrage ◽  
White Led ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Women’S Suffrage

My research highlights little-known aspects of African American participation in the mobilization on behalf of women’s suffrage in California, an issue of vital importance to African Americans. The history of suffrage in the United States is marked by varying degrees of denial of voting rights to African Americans. In California, African Americans were pivotal participants in three major suffrage campaigns. Based on black women’s support for the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted black men the right to vote, black men and women formed a critical political alliance, one in which black men almost universally supported black women’s suffrage. Black women began and continued their activism on behalf of male and female voting rights, not as an extension of white-led suffrage campaigns, but as an expression of African American political culture. African Americans—including black women suffragists—developed their own political culture, in part, to associate with those of similar culture and life experiences, but also because white-led suffrage organizations excluded black members. Black politics in California reflected African Americans’ confidence in black women as political actors and their faith in their own independent efforts to secure the franchise for both black men and women.

Conclusion

2014 ◽  
pp. 115-118
Author(s):  
Eddie S. Glaude
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
American Religion ◽  
Cultural Inheritance ◽  
African American Religion

African Americans are generally more religious than other groups in the United States. But African American religion is much more than a description of how deeply religious African Americans are. The phrase helps to differentiate a particular set of religious practices from others that are invested in whiteness; it invokes a particular cultural inheritance that marks the unique journey of African Americans in the United States. African American religion is rooted in the sociopolitical realities that shape the experiences of black people in America, but this is not static or fixed. The ‘Conclusion’ suggests that African American religious life remains a powerful site for creative imaginings in a world still organized by race.

scholarly journals The Challenges of Contemporary Criticism in Recent Studies of August Wilson

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Dr. P. Revathy ◽  
Dr. V. Peruvalluthi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
August Wilson ◽  
The Core ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
The Family ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
Power Position

August Wilson was one of the most skilful African-American playwrights of this century and was one of only seven to win the Pulitzer Prize. He devoted his career to acknowledge the 20th century struggles of African-Americans, decade by decade, in a sequence of ten plays. He completed the phase soon before he died of liver cancer on October 2, 2005. The themes of racism and inequity are the core elements in his plays which are depicted in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Joe Turner's Come and Gone. The selected novels are of African Americans' struggle for survival in racial separated society of America in which male characters struggling with financial problems due to their helplessness to find adequate work is a re-occurring theme in his plays, which weakens their power position in the family. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom articulate the weakness of black occupied males to make effectively in their social accepted roles and the various approaches the weak marginalized black men adopted to be considered men in America. This paper is aimed to study of the inability and subjectivity of the marginalized African Americans.

African American Soldiers and the Origins of Korean Transnational Adoption

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-61
Author(s):  
Kori A. Graves
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Korean Women ◽  
Transnational Adoption ◽  
Korean Children ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Child Centered ◽  
African American Soldiers ◽  
And Gender

African American soldiers took part in the child-centered humanitarian efforts that developed during the Korean War. The efforts that all soldiers made to provide food, clothing, shelter, and educations for Korean children displaced or orphaned by the war received considerable political and media attention. The black press mobilized the stories of black soldiers caring for Korean children to advance the fight for African Americans’ civil rights in the military and throughout US society. However, African American soldiers’ social and sexual relationships with Korean women revealed the ways that many black men exploited vulnerable women in war-torn countries. The children born as a result of these relationships faced punishing exclusions and ostracism because of US and Korean race and gender hierarchies that restricted the legal and social status of black men and the Korean women who associated with soldiers. These ideas would influence the development of Korean transnational adoption and African Americans’ participation in this method of family formation.

Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Libra R. Hilde
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
White Fathers ◽  
African American Communities ◽  
Enslaved African Americans

Analyzing published and archival oral histories of formerly enslaved African Americans, Libra R. Hilde explores the meanings of manhood and fatherhood during and after the era of slavery, demonstrating that black men and women articulated a surprisingly broad and consistent vision of paternal duty across more than a century. Complicating the tendency among historians to conflate masculinity within slavery with heroic resistance, Hilde emphasizes that, while some enslaved men openly rebelled, many chose subtle forms of resistance in the context of family and local community. She explains how a significant number of enslaved men served as caretakers to their children and shaped their lives and identities. From the standpoint of enslavers, this was particularly threatening--a man who fed his children built up the master’s property, but a man who fed them notions of autonomy put cracks in the edifice of slavery. Fatherhood highlighted the agonizing contradictions of the condition of enslavement, and to be an involved father was to face intractable dilemmas, yet many men tried. By telling the story of the often quietly heroic efforts that enslaved men undertook to be fathers, Hilde reveals how formerly enslaved African Americans evaluated their fathers (including white fathers) and envisioned an honorable manhood.

More Shadow than Substance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Wright Rigueur
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Substance P ◽  
National Committee ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Black Republicans ◽  
State And Local ◽  
American Party ◽  
Local Party

This chapter studies how, as the 1970s progressed, black Republicans were able to claim clear victories in their march toward equality: the expansion of the National Black Republican Council (NBRC); the incorporation of African Americans into the Republican National Committee (RNC) hierarchy; scores of black Republicans integrating state and local party hierarchies; and individual examples of black Republican success. African American party leaders could even point to their ability to forge a consensus voice among the disparate political ideas of black Republicans. Despite their ideological differences, they collectively rejected white hierarchies of power, demanding change for blacks both within the Grand Old Party (GOP) and throughout the country. Nevertheless, black Republicans quickly realized that their strategy did not reform the party institution.

Reducing Police Brutality in African American Communities: Potential Roles for Social Workers in Congregations

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 66-84
Author(s):  
Betty Wilson ◽  
Terry A. Wolfer
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
General Public ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Religious Congregations ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
African American Communities ◽  
White Congregations

In the last decade, there have been a shocking number of police killings of unarmed African Americans, and advancements in technology have made these incidents more visible to the general public. The increasing public awareness of police brutality in African American communities creates a critical and urgent need to understand and improve police-community relationships. Congregational social workers (and other social workers who are part of religious congregations) have a potentially significant role in addressing the problem of police brutality. This manuscript explores and describes possible contributions by social workers, with differential consideration for those in predominantly Black or White congregations.

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.

Slavery and Class in the American South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
The American South ◽  
Work Family

In this study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than sixty mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Andrews also reveals how class awareness shaped the views and values of some of the most celebrated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Slave narrators discerned class-based reasons for violence between “impudent,” “gentleman,” and “lady” slaves and their resentful “mean masters.” Status and class played key roles in the lives and liberation of the most celebrated fugitives from US slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. By examining the lives of the most- and least-acclaimed heroes and heroines of the African American slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers’ advantage, but at other times fueling convictions among even the most privileged of the enslaved that they deserved nothing less than complete freedom.

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