“There Would Be No Lynching If It Did Not Start in the Schoolroom”: Carter G. Woodson andthe Occasionof Negro History Week, 1926–1950

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 1457-1494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jarvis R. Givens
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
Embodied Learning ◽  
Grassroots Organizing ◽  
Black Schools ◽  
Material World ◽  
School Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Norm ◽  
New System

This article analyzes Carter G. Woodson’s iconic Negro History Week and its impact on Black schools during Jim Crow. Negro History Week introduced knowledge on Afro-diasporic history and culture to schools around the country. As a result of teachers’ grassroots organizing, it became a cultural norm in Black schools by the end of the 1930s. This program reflected Woodson’s critique that anti-Black ideas in school knowledge were inextricably linked to the violence Black people experienced in the material world. Thus, he worked to construct a new system of knowledge altogether. Negro History Week engaged students in this counterhegemonic knowledge through performances grounded in Black formalism and an invigorated Black aesthetic, facilitating what I have come to call “embodied learning.”

A Fine Southern Plantation

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-101
Author(s):  
Robert T. Chase
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Prison Labor ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Unpaid Labor ◽  
Labor Division ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Sexual Power ◽  
New System

The second chapter offers an analysis of how the reforms refashioned prison labor as the new tool of disciplinary control and racial hierarchy within a Jim Crow framework. When this new system was fully operational in the 1960s, Texas garnered plaudits as a pioneering, modern, efficient, and business-oriented enterprise as a modernization narrative. What fuelled the modernization narrative, however, was coerced field labor and a regime of labor division that prioritized prisoners through gender, racial, and sexual power. By moving beyond control penology’s external modernization narrative and dissecting how prison labor disciplined, ordered, and controlled every aspect of southern incarceration, this chapter shows how incarceration on the Texas prison plantation rendered Black, Brown, and even white bodies as slave labor where the state relegated prisoners to coerced and entirely unpaid labor, daily acts of bodily degradation, and the perpetual denial of civil and human rights. As an analysis of prison labor as carceral power, chapter two also analyzes how prisoners carved out hidden transcripts of resistance and survival that constructed a dissident culture and infrapolitics to trouble the southern modernization narrative.

scholarly journals “A Man's Story is His Gris-Gris”: Cultural Slavery, Literary Emancipation and Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada

1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Black Nationalism ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
Black Characters ◽  
The Common ◽  
New Criteria

With the emergence of black nationalism in the late sixties, the delineation of a new black aesthetic became an urgent issue: it was first and most persistently raised by Hoyt Fuller in Negro Digest, and soon became the staple of radical black little magazines across America. In 1971, the appearance of a collection of essays entitled The Black Aesthetic and edited by Addison Gayle brought some coherence to the debate, and sanctified its assumptions. In his own contributions to that book, Gayle recorded the passing of the myth of the American melting pot and the consequent need to repudiate assimilationism. He argued that black nationalism implied the development of a black aesthetic in direct opposition to prevailing aesthetic criteria, in which white cultural concerns were privileged under a guise of “universalism”: this bogus universalism actually depended upon the marginalization of black perspectives and black writers by a white literary establishment. Such observations established the need for a new black aesthetic, and prescriptions for its form proliferated. These blueprints were handed down at a series of conferences at which black writers past and present stood trial against the new criteria. The emergent consensus was for writing that directly recreated the black experience out of which it arose; that found its style in the forms of “black folk expression”; that was socially progressive in effect – according to a very literal concept of functional literature; that addressed itself to the common readership of black people; and that assiduously cultivated positive black characters.

Multidirectional Rememory: Slavery and the Holocaust in John A. Williams’s Clifford’s Blues

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 191-216
Author(s):  
Mark A. Tabone
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Racialized Violence ◽  
American Author ◽  
Black Queer ◽  
Multidirectional Memory

This article focuses on the representation of history in African American author John A. Williams’s 1999 novel, Clifford’s Blues, a fictional account of a Black, queer American expatriate’s internment and enslavement in a Nazi concentration camp. Through a critical perspective that incorporates the imaginative recovery of (often silenced) history that Toni Morrison (1987) called “rememory,” along with what Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg (2009) calls “multidirectional memory,” this article details Williams’s daring exploration of spaces of overlap between the histories of American slavery, Jim Crow, and the Nazi Holocaust. The article demonstrates how the novel’s unconventional and controversial emplotment allows Williams to create a distinctive historical critique not only of slavery and the Holocaust but, more broadly, of otherization, racialized violence, and modernity itself, while making a number of historiographic interventions. These include inscribing a largely absent history of the experience of Black people affected by the Holocaust and the mapping of theretofore underacknowledged resonances between American and German ideologies and practices. Through its transnational, transcultural “multidirectionality,” the novel opens up a broad, structural critique of apartheid everywhere; however, this article also argues that the novel also offers models for liberatory communities of resistance. The article demonstrates how Williams accomplishes this through his novel’s allegorical and literal use of the blues.

scholarly journals Travelers, Strangers, and Jim Crow: Law, Public Accommodations, and Civil Rights in America

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. K. Sandoval-Strausz
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Black People ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Just Society ◽  
Supreme Court Rulings

Public accommodations—hotels, trains, restaurants, steamboats, theaters, buses, motels, and the like—were for more than a century located at the epicenter of legal and political struggles for racial equality. From the age of Reconstruction to the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century, civil rights in public places stood alongside voting rights, school integration, and equal opportunity in employment and housing as conditions that black people and their allies claimed as necessary attributes of a just society. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 and the Supreme Court rulings in theCivil Rights Casesand especially inPlessy v. Fergusonwere critical episodes in the career of Jim Crow in the nineteenth century, followed in the twentieth by the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Material Resources

2020 ◽  
pp. 143-164
Author(s):  
Tyrone McKinley Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Black Schools ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
Financial Growth

Chapter 5 presents the range of material resources that Walker gifted to black individuals and organizations as an expression of her gospel of giving. Administered by her legal adviser, Freeman B. Ransom, these gifts reflected Walker’s philanthropic motivations during a period of significant financial growth for her company in the early 1910s. Drawing insights from the types of gifts given and the kinds and locations of recipients supported, the chapter demonstrates how black women’s philanthropy moved through black communities around the country. As a result, social needs were met, and a national infrastructure of organizations and networks was gradually constructed to navigate the debilitating effects of Jim Crow, and, eventually, dismantle the institution. The chapter presents four categories of giving by Walker: monetary, tangible nonmonetary items, employment, and institution building. It considers organizations she funded such as the colored branch of the YMCA and black schools and social services agencies, which were typically run by black women. Walker also engaged in criminal justice advocacy by funding attainment of pardons for black men jailed for murder. The geography of Walker’s giving emphasizes the importance of the cities of St. Louis, Missouri, and Indianapolis, Indiana, in her life story, as she maintained philanthropic commitments in those cities throughout her lifetime and afterward through her estate. The chapter examines Walker’s affinity for those cities and contrasts her gospel of giving, which emphasized the joy experienced in giving, with the larger scientific philanthropy movement of the era, which promoted rationalism over emotions in giving.

“I Ain’t no Man!”

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-88
Author(s):  
Veronica T. Watson
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Relationships ◽  
Black People ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Black History ◽  
The World ◽  
Women Of African Descent ◽  
The American South

As an African American man in Augusta, a town deeply rooted in the racist ideologies and practices of the segregated South, Frank Yerby certainly had had enough experiences with Jim Crow living, discrimination, and racial terrorism to fuel his writing for a lifetime. Despite becoming best-known, perhaps, for his prolific authorship of novels that focused primarily on white lives and characters, Yerby commented in an interview with Maryemma Graham, “In every novel I have written about the American South, I have subtly infused a very strong defense of Black history and Black people” (70). Rhetorical defenses in novels that are largely not about Black lives are certainly worth noting; however, in this chapter I argue that the exploration of the world as it impacted Black people was a more consistent interest for Yerby than many recognized. He wrote a number of short stories that specifically focused on the impacts of racism and subjugation on the Black psyche and identity, the intimate relationships between men and women of African descent, and the understandings and performances of Black masculinity.

Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 437
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Kennedy ◽  
Adam Fairclough
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Schools

Activism

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-142
Author(s):  
Tyrone McKinley Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Black Schools ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
Legislative Action ◽  
Fraternal Organizations ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Sales Agents

Chapter 4 discusses Walker’s gift of political and social activism and her leveraging of the number and voices of her agents to challenge Jim Crow. In a manner reflective of leading black women’s clubs and fraternal organizations of the day, Madam Walker organized her sales agents into local clubs and a national umbrella association to legitimize beauty culture as a profession, strengthen relations between them, and enlist them in doing charity and advocacy work in their communities that would last long after her death. The National Beauty Culturists’ and Benevolent Association of Madam C. J. Walker Agents, Inc., developed a model of associationalism, ritualism, and activism that galvanized Walker agents to serve their communities and the cause of racial uplift. Through it, agents regularly donated money to black schools and other organizations, held fundraising events, organized programs, and cared for the vulnerable in their communities. Together, they sent a resolution to President Woodrow Wilson demanding legislative action against lynching. The chapter reviews Walker’s unique ability to interact with black women across class differences, as exhibited by her engagement of working-class women in her agent clubs and the elite black women of the era through the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Through these clubs and their rituals, Walker agents staked claims for themselves as respectable professionals, performed charitable works in black communities, and used their formidable numbers to speak out against lynching and Jim Crow.

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