“Humor Ill-Advised, If Not Altogether Tasteless?”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phoebe Wolfskill
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Collective Mind ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Racial Stereotype ◽  
Historical Representations

Chapter 4 examines the ways in which caricature and stereotype informed articulations of African Americans in early twentieth-century art and visual culture. Although many artists embraced stereotypical figuration during this period for immediate readability, the appearance of caricatured figuration in the work of Motley and many of his contemporaries raises questions about the weight of historical representations of blackness within the collective mind. This chapter considers the use of caricature in relation to modernist forms of distortion and exaggeration, the persistence and relative acceptance of racial stereotype in visual culture—particularly as a satirical device—and the various subjectivities that come to play in defining methods of representation as acceptable or harmful. While emphasizing the variety of opinions constituting affirmative portrayals of blackness, a debate that played out in literature as well as art, this chapter explores how representations of black identity continued to rely on stereotype despite the discourse of racial reinvention.

Contested Terrain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Weems
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Business ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Bank ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Business Person

This chapter examines the “contested terrain” associated with the founding of Chicago’s Douglass National Bank in 1921. Anthony Overton, one of history’s most prominent African American entrepreneurs, is widely regarded as the founder of the second national bank organized by African Americans. Yet, the evidence indicates that this distinction should go to Pearl W. Chavers, a relatively obscure early twentieth-century black business person. The story of Anthony Overton’s ascent and P.W. Chavers’ descent in the Douglass National Bank’s administrative hierarchy reveals the power of money and influence. It also illuminates the nuances of both group and individual entrepreneur-based strategies for African American economic development.

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.

scholarly journals The Impact of the Great Migration on Mortality of African Americans: Evidence from the Deep South

2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (2) ◽  
pp. 477-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan A. Black ◽  
Seth G. Sanders ◽  
Evan J. Taylor ◽  
Lowell J. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Rural South ◽  
Us History ◽  
The North ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
The Impact

The Great Migration—the massive migration of African Americans out of the rural South to largely urban locations in the North, Midwest, and West—was a landmark event in US history. Our paper shows that this migration increased mortality of African Americans born in the early twentieth century South. This inference comes from an analysis that uses proximity of birthplace to railroad lines as an instrument for migration. (JEL I12, J15, N31, N32, N91, N92, R23)

“Spectacles in Color”: The Primitive Drag of Langston Hughes

2020 ◽  
pp. 106-133
Author(s):  
Sam See ◽  
Scott Herring ◽  
Heather Love ◽  
Wendy Moffat
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of

Langston Hughes’s “Spectacles in Color” envisions Harlem culture as a drag performance. The Weary Blues records a lyric history of modernist Harlem in poems that perform in drag, an aesthetic of visual crossing. This aesthetic ironically coincides with and also countermands the identitarian stereotypes of African Americans and queers that were propagated by early-twentieth-century sexological science and degeneration theory.

RACE, IMMIGRATION, AND PATTERNS OF INCORPORATION IN THE EARLY AMERICAN WELFARE STATE

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 555-559
Author(s):  
Anthony S. Chen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Early American ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Thanks to the work of numerous scholars, it is now well understood that African Americans were incorporated into the early twentieth-century welfare state—as it was then constituted—on a decidedly unequal basis. If African Americans were not altogether excluded by design from some programs, government officials were frequently less generous in determining the scope and extent of the benefits received by them compared to those received by Whites.

“Spectacles in Color”: The Primitive Drag of Langston Hughes

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (3) ◽  
pp. 798-816 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam See
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Down Low ◽  
Gender Differentiation ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Universe

The chapter “Spectacles in Color” in Langston Hughes's first autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), envisions modernist Harlem culture as a drag performance and offers a useful rubric for understanding Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926), a lyric history of that culture whose poems characteristically cross gender, sexual, racial, and even formal lines. The Weary Blues employs a low-down, or nature-based, and down-low, or queer, aesthetic of racial and gender crossing that I term “primitive drag,” an aesthetic that ironically coincides with the stereotypes of African Americans and queers that were propagated by early-twentieth-century sexological science and degeneration theory: namely, that blacks and queers were unnatural and degenerate because they, unlike whites and heterosexuals, exhibited a lack of racial and gender differentiation. Disidentifying with those stereotypes, the primitive drag in The Weary Blues depicts queer feeling as natural and nature as queer, thus offering a productive paradox for rethinking literary histories of modernism and theories of sexuality by the rather Darwinian notion that “the nature of the universe,” as Hughes calls it, is always subject to change, or queering.

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