Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Horne
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black America ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
The Way

This introductory chapter provides a background of Claude Barnett and the Associated Negro Press (ANP). Though not often recognized as such, Claude Barnett was one of the leading Pan-Africanists of the twentieth century, just as the ANP was an exemplar of the often discussed but little implemented doctrine of Pan-Africanism. Yet his very success carried the seeds of its demise; that is, as his anti-Jim Crow and anticolonial campaigns gained traction, it opened both Black America and Africa to incursions by mainstream entities that theretofore either had ignored these sizable communities or winked at their bludgeoning. Meanwhile, what ANP accomplished was to provide an assessment of the balance of global forces that historically had been essential in plotting the way forward for African Americans not least. Yet as the prize of anti-Jim Crow came within reach, ironically the way had been paved for the ultimate liquidation of the ANP.

The Whites Got the Best

2018 ◽  
pp. 81-120
Author(s):  
John M. Coggeshall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Community Identity ◽  
Baptist Church ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Economic Opportunities ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World

This chapter presents the story of Liberia during the early twentieth century, through the Depression and the world wars. As the nation’s economy changes, African Americans continue to abandon the region for better economic opportunities as they are also forced out by restrictive Jim Crow segregation and racialized attacks. Both Soapstone Baptist Church and Soapstone School continue, critical anchors for community identity. Some residents return to care for aging relatives. The story of Liberia is presented through the memories of elderly residents and some local historical sources, including obituaries.

“To Build a New World”: Black American Internationalism and Palestine Solidarity

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 52-68
Author(s):  
Russell Rickford
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Middle East ◽  
New World ◽  
Black American ◽  
The Political ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
Political Imaginary

This essay traces the arc of Black American solidarity with Palestine, placing the phenomenon in the context of twentieth-century African American internationalism. It sketches the evolution of the political imaginary that enabled Black activists to depict African Americans and Palestinians as compatriots within global communities of dissent. For more than half a century, Black internationalists identified with Zionism, believing that the Jewish bid for a national homeland paralleled the African American freedom struggle. During the 1950s and 1960s, however, colonial aggression in the Middle East led many African American progressives to rethink the analogy. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, African American dissidents operating within the nexus of Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Third Worldism constructed powerful theories of Afro-Palestinian kinship. In so doing, they reimagined or transcended bonds of color, positing anti-imperialist struggle, rather than racial affinity, as the precondition of camaraderie.

The Making of the Modern Death Penalty in Jim Crow North Carolina

2019 ◽  
pp. 192-214
Author(s):  
Seth Kotch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Convictions ◽  
The Impact

focuses on the transition from local public hangings to state-controlled electrocutions in North Carolina in the early twentieth century. The chapter addresses the impact of this shift on African American communities. Although the death penalty had long served as an instrument of racial control, the ritual of a local hanging nevertheless had allowed the condemned and black witnesses a public space to express religious convictions and honor the condemned’s suffering. Once the state seized control of this ritual, African Americans were largely excluded as witnesses. The modern death penalty thus came to represent the racial subjugation of Jim Crow, indeed having more in common with lynchings than legal hangings had.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Scott Parrish
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Media ◽  
Environmental Causes ◽  
The Way

This introductory chapter discusses the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. It argues that although historians have uncovered the details of what caused the flood to unfold the way it did, less work has been done to explain how, what was arguably the most publicly consuming environmental catastrophe of the twentieth century in the United States, assumed public meaning. The chapter then sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore how this disaster took on form and meaning as it was nationally and internationally represented across multiple media platforms, both while the flood moved inexorably southward and, subsequently, over the next two decades. The book begins by looking at the social and environmental causes of the disaster, and by briefly describing the sociological certitudes of the 1920s into which it broke. It then investigates how this disaster went public, and made publics, as it was mediated through newspapers, radio, blues songs, and theater benefits. Finally, it looks at how the flood comprises an important chapter in the history of literary modernism.

The Jim Crow Paradox

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Horne
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Kwame Nkrumah ◽  
Honest Broker ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
The World

This concluding chapter argues that the decline of forces represented by Paul Robeson meant that forces symbolized by Claude Barnett, who were surely interested in Pan-Africanism but also were seeking profitable investments, meant they were conflicting with African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah who had a socialist orientation; this was bound to create waves. Moreover, it was bound to undermine Associated Negro Press's (ANP) role as an honest broker or even as a cynical promoter of Washington's policies, all of which was hastening the agency's demise. Part of the paradox of Jim Crow was that as it eroded at a time when the Robesons were in retreat and the Nkrumahs of the world were ascending, conflict was bound to arise between Africans and African Americans, thus eroding too the global leverage that had been so instrumental in collapsing Jim Crow in the first place.

Federalism and the Demise of Prescriptive Racism in the United States

1995 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard P. Young ◽  
Jerome S. Burstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Governments ◽  
The South ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Do So

Not so long ago, nearly all African-Americans living in the United States were subject to a multitude of racial restrictions officially prescribed and enforced by state governments and their local subsidiaries. Most of the Jim Crow system dated from 1890–1910. By the middle of the twentieth century, this system was well established, so much so that many people assumed that it had always existed and that it expressed the timeless folkways of the South. However, in what strikes the historian as an astonishingly brief period during the 1950s and 1960s, the edifice was largely torn down. The puzzle is this: How could any institutional apparatus so deeply embedded, long-standing, and apparently strong be toppled so quickly? Although many scholars have discussed aspects of the puzzle, no one has offered a simple, clear, and compelling explanation. We aim to do so in this essay.

Whose Evidence? Which Account?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koritha Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
New South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Educational Opportunities ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
New Negro ◽  
The New Woman

This introductory chapter contends that lynching plays served as mechanisms through which African Americans survived the height of mob violence—and its photographic representation—still believing in their right to full citizenship. Lynching plays survive in the archive to enhance our understanding of the United States at the turn into the twentieth century; the genre was developed by African Americans aware of their communities' strategies for living with lynching—strategies that required a keen understanding of U.S. culture. As a genre, black-authored lynching drama sheds unique light on the New Negro, the New South, and the New Woman. As African Americans who had never known legal bondage came of age, they laid claim to unprecedented educational opportunities, and like other Americans, they went about the business of defining the contours of their modern identities.

Pan-Africanism Is the News

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Horne
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
Mainstream Press

This chapter explores the decline of the Associated Negro Press (ANP). It did not take long for the mainstream press to realize that the ANP was sitting on a journalistic goldmine with its direct pipeline to one of the biggest stories of the decade, if not the century: decolonization and how it intersected with the battle against Jim Crow. Claude Barnett was in an advance wave of African Americans descending upon Africa seeking to take advantage of the perceived gold rush delivered by decolonization. Another viselike pressure that the ANP found hard to resist was the other major force of that conflicted era: anticommunism. Unlike the past, the Negro press was now reluctant to hire talented writers with radical associations. As this high drama was unfolding, Barnett continued to live the good life in Chicago, making it difficult to grasp the far-reaching changes just over the horizon.

Shattering the Status Quo: Reading Modernism in the Early Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-52
Author(s):  
Arthur M. Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
Social Ideology ◽  
Tanizaki Jun'ichiro ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Way

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how literary modernism operated in Japan, looking at the works of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabayashi Taiko. Contrary to prevalent conceptions of high modernism as art-objects sequestered from the utilitarian language of capitalist society, modernist literature was highly enmeshed in the language of the mass print media, one of the major sources of social ideology since the beginning of the twentieth century. The works of the four Japanese authors disrupt the ideologies that made daily living appear seamless and comfortable. They did so to expose the way such norms were bolstered by narrow, constrictive, and essentialist notions of gender, ethnicity, society, and nation; to reveal the way such norms were employed to discipline the minds and behaviors of Japanese citizens; and finally to provoke cognitive and sensational liberation from the supremacy of these norms. The chapter then considers the emergence and establishment of the I-novel genre in Japanese literary history, as well as the phenomenon of modanizumu.

Conclusion: Interlocutory Cultures

2021 ◽  
pp. 227-236
Author(s):  
Jack Daniel Webb
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
The Face ◽  
Key Events ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Way

The conclusion considers the relations between and across the key moments in the chapters explored in this book. In particular, it explores the dynamic of vacillating ideas about Haiti over time; the way in which Haiti both faded but also returned at certain points to take up a burning relevance in the British imagination. This dynamic relied, the chapter argues, on the agency of Haitians in presenting their views to British counterparts in the face of efforts to ‘silence’ or otherwise disregard Haitian ideas. The chapter conceptualises this pattern of fading and return through the theoretical paradigm of spectrality. Much like ideas about Haiti, the spectre always has the potential to return with a burning significance. The chapter ends by gesturing forwards and meditating, briefly, on key events in the twentieth century, namely the invasion of Haiti in 1915 and the emergence of anti-colonial pan-Africanism.

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