scholarly journals Looking for Better: A History of Black Southern Migrations

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Selena Sanderfer Doss

A broad overview of migrations affecting black southerners is presented, including the Atlantic slave trade, the domestic slave trade, colonization movements to Sierra Leone and Liberia, the Exoduster movement, the Great Migration, and the Return South migration. Emigrants convey their experiences and motivations through testimonies and personal accounts. Surviving the trauma of forced migrations, black southerners organized numerous migration movements both outside and within American polities in search of better opportunities. In the late 20th century, black southerners also initiated a return migration to the American South and have since achieved notable socioeconomic and political progress.

Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan

Before the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 1807, colonial Sierra Leone was an experiment in free trade and free labour, founded by the Sierra Leone Company, a joint-stock company led by antislavery activists, and settled by African American Loyalists from Nova Scotia. This chapter explores the early history of the colony, and shows how antislavery was undermined by the routines of the transatlantic slave trade. Meanwhile, African American settlers were marginalised, and the arrival of 500 Jamaican Maroons in 1800 helped to cement the relationship between the leaders of the antislavery movement and the British armed forces.


Author(s):  
Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska

The landscapes and cityscapes of the sub-tropical Southern United States, with their opulent nature, exuberant cities, boisterous cultural diversity and troubled history of conflict and violence have long offered an alluring locale for Gothic narratives. This article explores the ways in which <em>The Southern Vampire Mysteries</em> (2001–2013) – the best-selling literary series by Charlaine Harris and the basis for the HBO TV series <em>True Blood</em> – construct the Gothicised imageries of the American South as the terrain of confusing ambivalences; of glamour and exoticism, death and the uncanny. Informed by the discourses of tropicality, Tropical and Urban Gothic and exotic tourism – and the ways they interweave with the concept of Otherness – the paper seeks to illuminate the process of interrelating and consequently exoticising the figure of the Other and Southern sub-tropical land- and cityscapes. It also examines the tropes of urban interspecies relations articulated in the series as a metaphor for the Southern racial/ethnic heritage with its anxieties of miscegenation, transgression and “excessive” heterogeneity. A particular emphasis is placed on the accounts of New Orleans as the liminal space of cultural blending and touristic exploration of the figure of the Other.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mallory Lapointe Taylor

Within the United States, the American South can be perceived as its own entity. From the arts to Southern cuisine, the South commands attention with its own history, myths and culture. Within the history of photography, Walker Evans's photographs of Alabama are arguably some of the most culturally significant images taken of the state and its residents. This thesis investigates how photographs of Alabama are collected in the same locality. By examining the collecting practices of four Alabama institutions in regards to photographs in general, and Walker Evans specifically, this case study will expand on the question of how photographs, in a Southern cultural context, work to create a sense of place and attachment to local geography.


1973 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 811-824 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Keith Aufhauser

In the last few years, the controversy over the economic history of slavery has centered about two positions. On the one hand, Genovese has argued that the slave mode of production was fundamentally antagonistic to the bourgeois mode and that the conflicts between the two systems doomed slavery to a nineteenth-century grave. On the other hand, Conrad and Meyer spawned many studies which, on the whole, denied that any specifically economic difficulties resulted from the fact that the American south was based on slave labor. Against Genovese's original claim that “the material basis of the planters' power was giving way,” the statistical evidence indicated that the profits of the slave plantation were as high as those on non-slave business investments, and that the diffusion of technological changes was rapid enough to cause a rate of productivity increase equal to that of all but the most rapidly growing sectors of the free economy. Sheer volume supplemented the elegance of the early discussion and our knowledge of the slave economy expanded considerably.


Author(s):  
Oluwatoyin Oduntan

The case for narrating the history of slavery and emancipation through the biography of enslaved Africans is strongly supported by the life and experiences of Samuel Ajayi Crowther. Kidnapped into slavery in 1821, recaptured and settled in Sierra Leone in 1822, he became a missionary in 1845, founder of the Niger mission in 1857, and Bishop of the Niger Mission in 1864. His life and career covered the span of the 19th century during which revolutionary forces like jihadist revolutions, the abolition of the slave trade, the rise of a new Westernized elite, and European colonization created the roots of the modern state system in West Africa. He was intricately tied to the Christian Missionary Society (CMS), Britain’s antislavery evangelical movement, resulting in Ajayi becoming the poster face of slavery, its acclaimed product of abolitionism, the preeminent advocate of evangelical emancipation, and the organizer of practical emancipation in West Africa. The leader of a very small group of Africans who worked diligently against the slave trade and domestic slavery, Ajayi also became a victim of the use of that agenda by imperialists. Thus, the contrasts of his life (i.e., slavery/freedom, nationalist/hybrid, preacher/investor, leader/weakling, linguist/literalist, etc.) were celebrated by himself, his patrons, and his evangelical followers on one hand, and denounced by his critics on the other. They underline the disagreements over his legacy, and indeed over the understanding of the institution of slavery, abolition, and emancipation in West Africa.


2019 ◽  
pp. 138-152
Author(s):  
João José Reis ◽  
Flávio dos Santos Gomes ◽  
Marcus J. M. de Carvalho ◽  
H. Sabrina Gledhill

After being captured by the Royal Navy brig Water Witch, the Ermelinda is taken to Sierra Leone, a British colony, the history of which is narrated from its foundation by philanthroposts, including the leading abolitionist Granville Sharp, in the late eighteenth century up until Rufino landed there in December 1841. British cruisers deposited scores of liberated Africans there40,000 in the 1830s alone. As a result, Sierra Leone’s population included people of different faiths and ethnicities from all over the western coast of Africa and Mozambique. Anti–slave trade Mixed Commissions were installed in Freetown, where the trial of the Ermelinda was carried out for two months.


Author(s):  
Perla M. Guerrero

Latinas/os were present in the American South long before the founding of the United States of America, yet knowledge about their southern communities in different places and time periods is deeply uneven. In fact, regional themes important throughout the South clarify the dynamics that shaped Latinas/os’ lives, especially race, ethnicity, and the colorline; work and labor; and migration and immigration. Ideas about racial difference, in particular, reflected specifics of place, and intersections of local, regional, and international endeavors and movements of people and resources. Accordingly, Latinas/os’ position and treatment varied across the South. They first worked in agricultural fields picking cotton, oranges, and harvesting tobacco, then in a variety of industries, especially poultry and swine processing and packing. The late 20th century saw the rapid growth of Latinas/os in southern states due to changing migration and immigration patterns that moved from traditional states of reception to new destinations in rural, suburban, and urban locales with limited histories with Latinas/os or with substantial numbers of immigrants in general.


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