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.

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.

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.

The Geography of Resistance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
Free Blacks ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Physical Suffering ◽  
Bad Weather

This chapter examines escape routes, churches, iron forges and furnaces, and waterways that make up the pathways to freedom and “the geography of resistance.” It considers the concept of freedom as a place by exploring the connections between freedom and the landscape, and between Black communities and the Underground Railroad. It discusses the obstacles that captives escaping slavery had to hurdle, such as losing the challenges of the terrain and bad weather, betrayal, physical suffering, and slave catchers. It also looks at houses as artifacts of the Underground Railroad in the landscape, along with the patterns of rural Black settlements and how most free Blacks often found themselves saddled with the least desirable land. It argues that the landscape is an intimate component of the Black experience, providing crucial pathways out of slavery, and that generations of escapees on the Underground Railroad turned to the sheltering anonymity of the land to conceal their journey.

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

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.

Population trends and migration patterns in the critically endangered Yellow-breasted Bunting (Emberiza aureola) in the Republic of Korea

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-63
Author(s):  
Jong-Gil Park ◽  
Chang-uk Park ◽  
Kyoung-Soon Jin ◽  
Yang-Mo Kim ◽  
Hee-Young Kim ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Population Trends ◽  
Critically Endangered ◽  
Republic Of Korea ◽  
Migration Patterns ◽  
The Republic ◽  
And Migration

scholarly journals Spatial and space-time correlations in systems of subpopulations with genetic drift and migration.

Genetics ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 133 (3) ◽  
pp. 711-727
Author(s):  
B K Epperson
Keyword(s):  
Population Genetics ◽  
Time Correlation ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Spatial Correlations ◽  
Gene Frequencies ◽  
Migration Patterns ◽  
Migration Rates ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Time Correlations ◽  
And Migration

Abstract The geographic distribution of genetic variation is an important theoretical and experimental component of population genetics. Previous characterizations of genetic structure of populations have used measures of spatial variance and spatial correlations. Yet a full understanding of the causes and consequences of spatial structure requires complete characterization of the underlying space-time system. This paper examines important interactions between processes and spatial structure in systems of subpopulations with migration and drift, by analyzing correlations of gene frequencies over space and time. We develop methods for studying important features of the complete set of space-time correlations of gene frequencies for the first time in population genetics. These methods also provide a new alternative for studying the purely spatial correlations and the variance, for models with general spatial dimensionalities and migration patterns. These results are obtained by employing theorems, previously unused in population genetics, for space-time autoregressive (STAR) stochastic spatial time series. We include results on systems with subpopulation interactions that have time delay lags (temporal orders) greater than one. We use the space-time correlation structure to develop novel estimators for migration rates that are based on space-time data (samples collected over space and time) rather than on purely spatial data, for real systems. We examine the space-time and spatial correlations for some specific stepping stone migration models. One focus is on the effects of anisotropic migration rates. Partial space-time correlation coefficients can be used for identifying migration patterns. Using STAR models, the spatial, space-time, and partial space-time correlations together provide a framework with an unprecedented level of detail for characterizing, predicting and contrasting space-time theoretical distributions of gene frequencies, and for identifying features such as the pattern of migration and estimating migration rates in experimental studies of genetic variation over space and time.

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