Visualizing Equality

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Social Reform Movements ◽  
Changing Roles ◽  
Visual Technologies

The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and disseminated throughout the United States by African Americans. Advances in visual technologies--daguerreotypes, lithographs, cartes de visite, and steam printing presses--enabled people to see and participate in social reform movements in new ways. African American activists seized these opportunities and produced images that advanced campaigns for black rights. In this book, Aston Gonzalez charts the changing roles of African American visual artists as they helped build the world they envisioned. Understudied artists such as Robert Douglass Jr., Patrick Henry Reason, James Presley Ball, and Augustus Washington produced images to persuade viewers of the necessity for racial equality, black political leadership, and freedom from slavery. Moreover, these activist artists’ networks of transatlantic patronage and travels to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa reveal their extensive involvement in the most pressing concerns for black people in the Atlantic world. Their work demonstrates how images became central to the ways that people developed ideas about race, citizenship, and politics during the nineteenth century.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 233-238
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Expanded Access ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Visual Technologies

The epilogue shows how the democratization of photography allowed black people to produce images of themselves and their communities when a massive wave of racial caricatures flooded homes in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Visual technologies of the nineteenth century vastly expanded access to cameras which enabled more people to record African American communities and challenge racist ideas. W. E. B. Du Bois exhibited hundreds of photographs taken by Thomas Askew, the African photographer, at the Paris Exposition of 1900. These scenes of black life in Georgia conveyed the power of the ordinary and Du Bois himself wrote that they challenged “conventional American ideas” of black people.

The Optics of Liberian Emigration

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-167
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Fugitive Slave

This chapter explores the life and work of Augustus Washington, the free African American photographer, who envisioned more rights and freedoms than those available in the United States. Anticipating a future in the United States bound by racial restraints, he packed up his successful photography studio in Hartford, Connecticut, and emigrated to Monrovia, Liberia. Washington worked closely with the American Colonization Society to convince black Americans to leave their homeland for Liberia and attempted to provoke viewers of his images to envision the potential of black rights in the United States that he enjoyed in Liberia. Washington’s images promulgating black Liberian political leadership and economic promise abroad offered a vision of freedom that belied a hierarchical, and often oppressive, Liberian society. In the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, his images brought into focus the debates among African Americans about the uncertain, and perhaps imperiled, future of black people in the United States.

Religion in African American History

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Weisenfeld
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Black People ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Nation Of Islam ◽  
Spiritual Support ◽  
Methodist Episcopal

Dynamic and creative exchanges among different religions, including indigenous traditions, Protestant and Catholic Christianity, and Islam, all with developing theologies and institutions, fostered substantial collective religious and cultural identities within African American communities in the United States. The New World enslavement of diverse African peoples and the cultural encounter with Europeans and Native Americans produced distinctive religious perspectives that aided individuals and communities in persevering under the dehumanization of slavery and oppression. As African Americans embraced Christianity beginning in the 18th century, especially after 1770, they gathered in independent church communities and created larger denominational structures such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and the National Baptist Convention. These churches and denominations became significant arenas for spiritual support, educational opportunity, economic development, and political activism. Black religious institutions served as contexts in which African Americans made meaning of the experience of enslavement, interpreted their relationship to Africa, and charted a vision for a collective future. The early 20th century saw the emergence of new religious opportunities as increasing numbers of African Americans turned to Holiness and Pentecostal churches, drawn by the focus on baptism in the Holy Spirit and enthusiastic worship that sometimes involved speaking in tongues. The Great Migration of southern blacks to southern and northern cities fostered the development of a variety of religious options outside of Christianity. Groups such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam, whose leaders taught that Islam was the true religion of people of African descent, and congregations of Ethiopian Hebrews promoting Judaism as the heritage of black people, were founded in this period. Early-20th-century African American religion was also marked by significant cultural developments as ministers, musicians, actors, and other performers turned to new media, such as radio, records, and film, to contribute to religious life. In the post–World War II era, religious contexts supported the emergence of the modern Civil Rights movement. Black religious leaders emerged as prominent spokespeople for the cause and others as vocal critics of the goal of racial integration, as in the case of the Nation of Islam and religious advocates of Black Power. The second half of the 20th century and the early 21st-first century saw new religious diversity as a result of immigration and cultural transformations within African American Christianity with the rise of megachurches and televangelism.

The Early Life and Career of the "Black Patti": The Odyssey of an African American Singer in the Late Nineteenth Century

2000 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Graziano
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Caribbean

The early career of the African American singer Matilda Sissieretta Jones (1868-1933), known as the "Black Patti," was unique in nineteenth-century America. Reviewers gave high praise to her singing, and she attracted large mixed-race audiences to her concerts across the country. Her fame was such that, during the early 1890s, she appeared as the star of several companies in which she was the only black performer. This article documents her early life in Portsmouth, Virginia, and Providence, Rhode Island; her two tours, in 1888 and 1890, to the Caribbean and South America; and her varied concert appearances in the United States and Europe up to the formation of the Black Patti Troubadours in the fall of 1896.

scholarly journals Black Cowboys In the American West: A Historiographical Review

1997 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-89
Author(s):  
David Goldstein-Shirley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American West ◽  
The United States ◽  
Half Century ◽  
History Texts ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Few subjects in the ethnic experience of the United States are as fraught with mythology and misinformation as black cowboys. Although absent from most classic history texts of the American West, black cowboys probably constituted about a quarter of the working cowboys in the nineteenth century, although q uantitative data to establish a number are lacking. This essay reviews the historiography of black cowboys published during the last half-century, noting how much of it is marred either by glossing over the presence of black cowboys or by credulously repeating estimates of their numbers established by earlier work. The essay speculates whether such problematic scholarship stems from unacknowledged prejudice among mainstream historians or from carelessness and calls for more and improved scholarly attention to the role of African American cowboys in the American West.

Blacksound

2020 ◽  
pp. 553-577
Author(s):  
Matthew D. Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Copyright Laws ◽  
Blackface Performance ◽  
Performance Of Race

This chapter considers the relationship between philosophy, music, and race through a theory of Blacksound. Blacksound is the sonic and embodied legacy of blackface performance as the origin of popular music, entertainment, and culture in the United States. As a hermeneutic tool, Blacksound is an epistemology designed to historicize and redress how we conceive the formation of race and property laws throughout the nineteenth century via aesthetics. In particular, this tool analyses the construction, consumption, and erasure of black people and blackness out of blackface minstrelsy—the first original form of popular entertainment in North America. Blacksound is an open concept that challenges fixed notions of intellectual property by pointing to the role that the performance of race and the making of racism in popular music plays in copyright laws that have developed throughout the nineteenth century.

An Africana Philosophical Reading of Du Bois’s Political Thought

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis R. Gordon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
New England ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Black People ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The Status ◽  
Global Influence

Lewis R. Gordon’s essay focuses on Du Bois’s shift from New England liberalism to international radicalism and his global influence in Africana thought, despite his focus on African American politics. Though Du Bois’s expectation of equality for black people in the United States was a supremely radical idea on its own, it was his association with the black tradition of addressing social contradictions and imagining a future of grappling with them that led to the development of his radical philosophical anthropology. Du Bois, like many other Africana scholars, used his theories to express why black people could no longer wait to challenge the status quo. Therefore, Africana political theorists must assert the humanity of people of African descent, which necessitates an explanation of why they are human and how they have historically been excluded from definitions of humanity.

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.

The Effect of Geography and Vitamin D on African American Stature in the Nineteenth Century: Evidence from Prison Records

2008 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 812-831 ◽  
Author(s):  
SCOTT ALAN CARSON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vitamin D ◽  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
Established Method ◽  
Black Farmers ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
Height Data

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in economic literature. Although blacks and whites today reach similar terminal statures in the United States, nineteenth-century African American statures were consistently shorter than those of whites. Greater insolation (vitamin D production) is documented here to be associated with taller black statures. Black farmers were taller than workers in other occupations, and, ironically, black youth statures increased during the antebellum period and decreased with slavery's elimination.

The African American Denominational Tradition: The Rise of Black Denominations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis C. Dickerson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Black People ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
African American Leadership ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Church

From the formation of the first independent African American Protestant denomination in the 1810s and 1820s to the opening decades of the 21st century, independent African American denominations have stood at the center of black religious life in the United States. Their longevity and influence have made them central to the preservation of black beliefs, practices, and rituals; have provided venues to promote movements for black freedom; and have incubated African American leadership in both the church and civic spheres. They have intertwined with every aspect of American and African American life, whether cultural, political, or economic, and they engaged the international involvement of American society and the diasporic interests of black people. Parallel assemblies composed of black ministers pastoring black congregations that remained within white denominations also emerged within the traditional white denominations, including the white Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational Protestant groups, plus the Catholic Church. Although they eschewed withdrawing from the white denominations, their extramural bodies functioned as a virtual black ecclesia, or institutional bodies, even though they remained smaller than the growing independent black denominations. Together, the black preachers and parishioners in independent black denominations and inside traditional white denominations maintained churches characterized by proud histories and long records of frontline involvements in black freedom pursuits.

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