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.

“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.

Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Landscape Features ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
Free Black ◽  
African American Communities

This enlightening study employs the tools of archaeology to uncover a new historical perspective on the Underground Railroad. Unlike previous histories of the Underground Railroad, which have focused on frightened fugitive slaves and their benevolent abolitionist accomplices, this book focuses instead on free African American communities, the crucial help they provided to individuals fleeing slavery, and the terrain where those flights to freedom occurred. This book foregrounds several small, rural hamlets on the treacherous southern edge of the free North in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. It demonstrates how landscape features such as waterways, iron forges, and caves played a key role in the conduct and effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. Rich in oral histories, maps, memoirs, and archaeological investigations, this examination of the “geography of resistance” tells the new, powerful, and inspiring story of African Americans ensuring their own liberation in the midst of oppression.

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.

Priesthood Ordination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Stapley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Church ◽  
Power And Authority

Early Mormons used the Book of Mormon as the basis for their ecclesiology and understanding of the open heaven. Church leaders edited, harmonized, and published Joseph Smith’s revelation texts, expanding understandings of ecclesiastical priesthood office. Joseph Smith then revealed the Nauvoo Temple liturgy, with its cosmology that equated heaven, kinship, and priesthood. This cosmological priesthood was materialized through sealings at the temple altar and was the context for expansive teachings incorporating women into priesthood. This cosmology was also the basis for polygamy, temple adoption, and restrictions on the participation of black men and women in the church. This framework gave way at the end of the nineteenth century to a new priesthood cosmology introduced by Joseph F. Smith based on male ecclesiastical office. As church leaders expanded the meaning of priesthood to comprise the entire power and authority of God, they struggled to integrate women into church cosmology.

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.

Age Differences in Knowledge about HIV Transmission among African-American Men and Women

2007 ◽  
Vol 101 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1133-1140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Kathleen Burlew
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Hiv Transmission ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Hiv And Aids ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Younger Women ◽  
Older African Americans ◽  
The Difference

To test whether knowledge about HIV transmission may be one contributing factor to the disproportionately high rates of HIV and AIDS cases among older African Americans, this study examined data from 448 African-American men and women, who completed the AIDS Knowledge and Awareness Scale. Overall the findings supported the hypothesis that older African Americans were not as knowledgeable as their younger counterparts. However, the analyses also indicated older (age 61+) African-American women were significantly less knowledgeable about HIV transmission than the younger women. However, the difference between older and younger men was not significant. One implication is that older African Americans, especially women, should be targets of educational efforts.

Voices of Thunder

2019 ◽  
pp. 36-83
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Wall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
David Walker ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Written Word ◽  
Maria Stewart

This chapter accounts for the centrality of nineteenth-century black oral culture to the development of the essay as a distinct African American literary genre. The author illustrates how the sermons and orations of nineteenth-century men and women such as David Walker, Maria Stewart, Henry Highland Garnet, Frances Harper, and Fredrick Douglass laid the foundation for the African American essay. It is shown how these authors combined accounts of their personal experience with traditions of oral performance. Because the line between the spoken and written word was blurred by nineteenth-century conventions, these authors blended various rhetorical and performance strategies to shape the art of the essay. In doing so, these writers became “voices of thunder.”The essayists discussed in this chapter used biblical references and appropriated democratic discourse to advance anti-slavery agendas. They appropriated the rhetoric of the founding documents of the American republic and remade them into the rhetoric of counterrevolution. Their works emphasized the material realities of life in America for blacks, both enslaved and free. Their expressions of freedom, and the rhetorical strategies they modelled informed the work of their literary descendants.

Let Us Grow Strong by Organization and Earnest Cooperation

2018 ◽  
pp. 135-157
Author(s):  
Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations ◽  
National Leaders

This chapter focuses on the formation of national civil rights organizations in Boston and how they confronted the rising tide of Jim Crow in the final decade of the nineteenth century. Through these organizations, black men and women merged local political concerns with a broader movement for racial equality. This chapter pays particular attention to the Boston black community’s response to the rise in southern lynching. In doing so, it expands the historical narrative that has focused on anti-lynching during the 1890s as a product of the actions of central national leaders.

Love, sexuality, and (non)marriage

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirley A. Hill
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Men ◽  
African American Families ◽  
Economic Disadvantage ◽  
Health Consequences ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Unwanted Pregnancies ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
American Families

Slavery, segregation, and economic disadvantage have historically undermined the functionality and resilience of African-American families, and the post-industrial turn in the economy exasperated those difficulties. This chapter looks at the health consequences of the ‘love and trouble’ tradition between black men and women, especially in terms of non-marriage, loneliness, sexuality, sexual diseases, and unwanted pregnancies.

Savior of the Race: The Messianic Burdens of Black Masculinity

Exchange ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald B. Neal
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
African American Communities

Abstract This paper is concerned with the messianic construction of manhood within African American communities in North America and its normative imprint in shaping and measuring masculinity among African Americans. In this essay, messianic manhood is treated as a utopian construction of masculinity that is found in liberal and conservative constructions of Protestant Christianity. In examining this tradition of manhood, representative messianic men are interrogated who have participated in and have been shaped by this tradition. Overall, messianic manhood is inconceivable apart from an oral tradition of preaching and singing where the person of Jesus is understood as Lord, savior, and ally of the oppressed.

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