scholarly journals African Americans’ Dreams and Expression of Love during the Great Depression: A Critical Reading through <i>Of Mice and Men</i> by John Steinbeck

2020 ◽  
Vol 08 (07) ◽  
pp. 26-34
Author(s):  
Didier Kombieni
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
John Steinbeck ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Of Mice And Men

Haiti and the Bolshevik Revolution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Horne
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The U.S

This chapter examines the U.S. occupation of Haiti and the Bolshevik Revolution. Claude Barnett was sufficiently insightful to realize that the U.S. occupation of Haiti, which had commenced in 1915 and was to last until 1934, was not in his or his class's interests. Moreover, as numerous African Americans moved leftward during this same period under the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution and the emergent U.S. Communist Party, Barnett—though a staunch Republican—demonstrated his flexibility by seeking to accommodate them too. Unlike some in his class, Barnett did not instinctively bow to either colonialism or anticommunism. Indeed, the racial and class interests of Barnett directed him toward anticolonialism and thus, in turn, led this Republican toward aligning with a growing left-wing influence among African Americans propelled by the intensified impoverishment brought by the Great Depression.

3. Tradition and modernization

2020 ◽  
pp. 38-54
Author(s):  
Charles Reagan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Holy War ◽  
Public Places ◽  
Political Role ◽  
The Great Depression

‘Tradition and modernisation’ details how, after the American Civil War, white southern ideologists minimized slavery’s importance as a cause of the war. The religion of the Lost Cause invested enormous spiritual significance to a cause portrayed as a holy war against northern atheism. The Lost Cause movement had solidified in the last decade of the nineteenth century at the same time new laws excluded African Americans from any political role in the South and segregated them into inferior schools and other public places. Jim Crow became the name for the southern system of racial segregation. The Progressive era, the Great Depression, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal are all important landmarks for this period.

Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple Tap Past Jim Crow

2016 ◽  
pp. 730-748
Author(s):  
Ann Murphy
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Tap Dance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Old Men

During the Great Depression, Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple made a number of films together in which narratives depict an America where African Americans are happy slaves or docile servants, Civil War (even southern) soldiers are noble Americans, and voracious capitalists are kindly old men. But within these minstrel tropes and origin stories designed for uplift, the films challenge regressive ideologies through the incendiary dance partnership of Robinson and Temple. Studying the Stair Dance in The Little Colonel, this chapter argues that their screendance interludes complexly shift and manipulate our perspective: while the tap dance is part of the story, it is bracketed as a time outside the movie’s narrative flow. This thrusts the dance through the fixity of Jim Crow social constructs to reveal them as constructs, demonstrating the layered and molten nature of race and gender, and offering moviegoers a vision of the sociological and existential structures of US society reimagined.

African Americans in the Great Depression and New Deal

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
The United States ◽  
Government Programs ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Black Life ◽  
The New Deal

For African Americans, the Great Depression and the New Deal (1929–1940) marked a transformative era and laid the groundwork for the postwar black freedom struggle in the United States. The outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929 caused widespread suffering and despair in black communities across the country as women and men faced staggering rates of unemployment and poverty. Once Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), a Democrat, was inaugurated as president in 1933, he launched a “New Deal” of ambitious government programs to lift the United States out of the economic crisis. Most African Americans were skeptical about benefiting from the New Deal, and racial discrimination remained rampant. However, a cohort of black advisors and activists critiqued these government programs for excluding African Americans and enacted some reforms. At the grassroots level, black workers pressed for expanded employment opportunities and joined new labor unions to fight for economic rights. As the New Deal progressed a sea change swept over black politics. Many black voters switched their allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic Party, waged more militant campaigns for racial justice, and joined interracial and leftist coalitions. African Americans also challenged entrenched cultural stereotypes through photography, theater, and oral histories to illuminate the realities of black life in the United States. By 1940, African Americans now wielded an arsenal of protest tactics and were marching on a path toward full citizenship rights, which remains an always evolving process.

scholarly journals Eleanor Roosevelt’s blindspot:

2011 ◽  
pp. 107-111
Author(s):  
Geraldine Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
African Americans ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
White House ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The World ◽  
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt was an American Hero. She had overcome great personal adversity by the time she read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1948. The occasion represented the pinnacle of her life’s work as an esteemed humanitarian. The title, “First Lady of the World”, bestowed upon her by President Harry Truman was considered well deserved in view of her efforts for social justice and the protection of minorities – for those whose lives had been shattered by the Great Depression, for African Americans and for European Jewry when it was targeted by Hitler. While the stories of the years of her marriage to Franklin Delano Roosevelt have attracted the attention of historians and resulted in numerous scholarly and popular works, the post-White House period has been thus far neglected. It is this latter stage that my research considers. It is ...

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