Miller Grove, Illinois

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
American Missionary Association ◽  
White Families ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
South Central ◽  
History Of ◽  
Archaeological Excavations

This chapter examines the connections between the Miller Grove community of free Blacks and the Underground Railroad. Established in 1844, Miller Grove is a cluster of rural farmsteads named for Bedford Miller, whose family stood among the sixty-eight people who received their freedom from one of four White families in south-central Tennessee. Primary archaeological excavations at Miller Grove took place at the farmstead of William Riley Williams, a free-born African American from Tennessee. Among the original migrants, former slaveholder Henry Sides and his wife lived among the freemen and freewomen at Miller Grove. This chapter begins with a discussion of how the American Missionary Association, through its missionary work, linked known Underground Railroad participants across the country. It then considers abolitionist strategies, particularly the dissemination of antislavery literature among African Americans. By tracing the history of Miller Grove, the chapter reveals distinct details of community formation and interracial cooperation within regional Underground Railroad operations.

Rethinking African American Migration

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Migration Patterns ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
And Migration ◽  
American Migration

This chapter explores the relationship between migration, displacement, and the Underground Railroad movement. More specifically, it considers the processes of community building and the causes of migration that led Blacks to live where they did and to flee when they had to. It shows how migration became a means of escape from slavery, first by discussing maroon settlements that functioned as the African diaspora's first communities for free Blacks and began the progression to the Underground Railroad. It then explains how Black community formation and the Underground Railroad shifted between constant migration and displacement that began with the Middle Passage, and how emigration and colonization schemes of the pre-Civil War abolitionist era influenced displacement and migration patterns. This analysis looks at African American migration from a new perspective by sifting through the range of ways in which people of color entered into and interacted with their surroundings. It suggests that migration, both voluntary and forced, courses through the Black experience.

Post-Black Satire

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-140
Author(s):  
Yogita Goyal
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
Paul Beatty ◽  
Distinct Body

This chapter collides the idiom of post-blackness with the dominant genre of the neo-slave narrative in contemporary African American literature. This distinct body of work—post-black neo-slave narratives—mines the historical scene of slavery in the mode of satire. Through absurd juxtapositions, surreal analogies, and farcical adventures, post-black satirists expose the contradictions of the insistence on the unending history of slavery amid declarations of a break from previous racial regimes. Viewing satire as the lens through which debates about race and postracialism articulate, the chapter explores how fictions by Paul Beatty and Mat Johnson combat the sentimental template of abolition and neo-abolition by refusing to collapse past and present. The chapter concludes with a look at what might be termed a post-black post-satire, as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) stretches time and space to transform the slave narrative into a flexible portal to practices of exploitation worldwide.

Family, Church, Community

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Black Churches ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Church And Community ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
American Churches ◽  
Church Organizations

This chapter explores the roles played by family, church, and community in the Black Underground Railroad movement. By mapping Black settlements, it clarifies and exposes the relationship between African American churches, settlements, and historic Underground Railroad routes. It shows how Black families sustained an important family organizational structure that drove the Underground Railroad. It explains how African American communities connected through family relations and intermarriage, church organizations, benevolent societies, and the fraternal structure of the Prince Hall Masons. It considers how maintaining family connections motivated escape from slavery, particularly when imminent sale threatened to break up the family. Finally, it highlights the ways that Black churches and their ministers helped free Blacks, or self-liberated men and women, to succeed in winning freedom for themselves and their loved ones.

Making Black Los Angeles

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marne L. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
American Founding ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

Black Los Angeles started small. The first census of the newly formed Los Angeles County in 1850 recorded only twelve Americans of African descent alongside a population of more than 3,500 Anglo Americans. Over the following seventy years, however, the African American founding families of Los Angeles forged a vibrant community within the increasingly segregated and stratified city. In this book, historian Marne L. Campbell examines the intersections of race, class, and gender to produce a social history of community formation and cultural expression in Los Angeles. Expanding on the traditional narrative of middle-class uplift, Campbell demonstrates that the black working class, largely through the efforts of women, fought to secure their own economic and social freedom by forging communal bonds with black elites and other communities of color. This women-led, black working-class agency and cross-racial community building, Campbell argues, was markedly more successful in Los Angeles than in any other region in the country. Drawing from an extensive database of all African American households between 1850 and 1910, Campbell vividly tells the story of how middle-class African Americans were able to live, work, and establish a community of their own in the growing city of Los Angeles.

The Student’s Hand: Industrial Education and Racialized Labor in Early Korean Protestantism

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-378
Author(s):  
Jang Wook Huh
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Early History ◽  
Manual Labor ◽  
Industrial Education ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global Sale ◽  
American Leader

Abstract In the 1900s American missionaries used the industrial vision of the African American leader Booker T. Washington to instill the idea of economic progress in Koreans. Inspired by this uplift model, the Korean intellectual Yun Ch’i-ho (Yun Ch’iho) and US Southern Methodists founded the Anglo-Korean School in 1906, where students would later produce textile products called “Korea mission cloth” for global sale. This article examines the promotion of manual labor in the intersection of religious propagation and educational reform during the early twentieth century. The author argues that the idealization of industrialization by American and Korean Protestant leaders was a vehicle to both disseminate American discourses of race and institutionalize a system of capitalism in the name of modernizing Korea. This early history of Korean Protestantism has influenced the hierarchical conceptualizations of the white, black, and Asian races, which has been obscured by the benevolent achievements of missionary work.

Reading Race and Place

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Chabot Davis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Metropolitan Area ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Book Clubs ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
History Of ◽  
Racially Mixed ◽  
Race And Place

This chapter focuses on the reception of two African American “post-soul” novels that deconstruct essentialist ideas about race. Inviting readers to reconsider binary understandings of blackness and whiteness, Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003) focuses on free blacks who own slaves in the antebellum South, while Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998) details the coming of age of a mixed-race girl in Boston in the 1970s and 1980s. The chapter examines how the reading of a racially charged text is influenced by the readers' locality and the communities in which they live and participate. It also compares the conversations of racially mixed book clubs to those with all white or all African American members, and analyzes the connections and disjunctions between empathetic reading and the readers' political lives within a metropolitan area with a long history of racial antagonism.

Destination Freedom

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
Black Churches ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Research Strategies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Critical Junctures ◽  
Black Abolitionists ◽  
History Of

By focusing on the geography of resistance and its landscape features in four different Black settlements, this book has cast a different light on the nature of Black escape from slavery and the history of Underground Railroad activities. It has shown that free Blacks carried out much of the clandestine work of the Underground Railroad as they sought freedom in pre-Civil War America, thus contributing in a significant way to the efforts inside one of the world's most successful resistance movements. Whether urban or rural, Black settlements positioned at the borders between northern and southern states or at other critical junctures acted as the first line of freedom while simultaneously offering sanctuary to escaping captives. The book has also highlighted migration as a means of escape for fleeing slaves, as well as the crucial roles played by Black churches, Black families, and Black abolitionists in the success of the Black underground. This concluding chapter summaries the book's research strategies and the future implications of its findings for reshaping modern interpretation of the Underground Railroad.

Rocky Fork, Illinois

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
Social Institution ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Ame Church ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Black Resistance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Influence

This chapter examines the Rocky Fork community's relationship to other nearby Black communities and to the Underground Railroad. Drawing on oral and family histories, it reconstructs the story of the African American presence at Rocky Fork, first by discussing the site's originating families. It then considers the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first social institution and the earliest AME church built in Illinois, and how the Underground Railroad emerged as a multi-pronged vehicle for Black resistance and escape from slavery. The chapter identifies evidence of cooperation between Black settlements on the frontlines of freedom and known abolitionist towns and shows that the abolitionist center and Underground Railroad town of Alton played a powerful role in the fight against slavery in the region. Minister William Paul Quinn and the early influence of the AME Church embedded in the Underground Railroad history of the Rocky Fork settlement and its free Blacks characterizes the geography of resistance.

Not as It Is Written

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
International Exhibition ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Made In

This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.

Preserving the Innovative Legacy of John P. Parker

2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-68
Author(s):  
Jason Krupar
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Historical Society ◽  
Railroad Network ◽  
University Of Cincinnati ◽  
Business Acumen ◽  
The University

John P. Parker played a prominent role in the Underground Railroad network that operated in southwest Ohio. Additionally, Parker held three known patents and displayed his products at regional/national industrial expositions. Parker’s engineering skills and business acumen, however, have largely been overlooked. A coalition comprised of faculty and students from the University of Cincinnati, members of the John P. Parker Historical Society, and corporate donors formed in 2006 to preserve the industrial legacy of this African American entrepreneur. This project demonstrates some of the benefits and pitfalls of such complicated undertakings.

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