On Jordan’s Banks

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry Pimblott
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Black Churches ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Economic Position

Chapter One provides a broad historical overview of African American community formation in Cairo, illuminating how the region’s economic instability and distinct blend of northern and southern racial practices combined to solidify the Black church’s emergence as the leading institution in local community-building and protest traditions. This chapter argues that the Black church’s preeminence was not inevitable. It was instead a creative and necessary response to broader patterns of Black political marginalization and an absence of alternative institutions due to the precarious economic position of Cairo’s Black working-class. The chapter also contends that the ability of Cairo’s Black churches to fill this organizational vacuum was made possible by the distinctive religious tradition harbored by African American communities across the borderland.

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.

African American English in Appalachia

2004 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Becky Childs ◽  
Christine Mallinson
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
Local Community ◽  
American English ◽  
Regional Identity ◽  
African American English ◽  
Mountain Region ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Consonant Cluster ◽  
Local Dialect

Recent studies of bi-ethnic enclave dialect communities in the American South suggest that earlier versions of African American speech both accommodated local dialect norms and exhibited a persistent substratal effect from the early African-European contact situation. We examine this hypothesis by considering the sociolinguistic situation in Texana, North Carolina, a small African American community in the Smoky Mountain region of Appalachia. Though its population is only about 150 residents, it is the largest African American community in the Smoky Mountains. This study considers diagnostic sociolinguistic variables for Texana residents in order to examine the extent to which the members of this African American community align their speech with local dialect norms as the basis for evaluating the status of earlier and contemporary African American English (AAE) in Appalachia. Morphosyntactic variables examined are 3rd pl. -s attachment, 3rd sg. -s absence, copula absence, and past tense be leveling; phonological variables include rhoticity, syllable coda consonant cluster reduction, and /ai/ glide weakening. When compared to cohort white Appalachian speakers, data from older Texana residents confirm the regional accommodation of earlier AAE and at the same time point toward substrate influence in the historical development of AAE. However, unlike AAE in other enclave regional contexts, we find that the dialect of younger residents is not moving toward a supraregional norm of AAE. Instead, young speakers are accommodating several key features of Southern American English, specifically the Southern Appalachian English (AppE) variety that is characteristic of the Smoky Mountain region of North Carolina. Explanations for the attested diachronic changes as well as future trajectories of change for Texana speakers must appeal to sociopsychological factors such as regional identity and orientation to explain local community language norms.

An Overview: Catholics in the South and Desegregation, 1971–1992

2018 ◽  
pp. 237-268
Author(s):  
Mark Newman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Black Churches ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
The South ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
White Schools ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
The Church

The early 1970s saw growing disillusionment among southern African American Catholics with diocesan desegregation policies that had produced little desegregation, ignored blacks in the decision-making process and deprived black communities of valued institutions, leaving their members often feeling unwelcome in formerly white schools and churches. In response, the vast majority of prelates continued, and some, occasionally, built new, de facto black churches, no longer viewing them as unacceptable signs of segregation but as a vital part of the Church’s outreach to the African American community. In 1989, George A. Stallings Jr. broke with the Catholic Church by forming Imani Temple and inaugurating the independent African-American Catholic Congregation. Most African American Catholics did not follow him out of the church, although many sympathized with his criticism of racism within it. Blacks in the South and nation remained underrepresented among Catholic clergy and religious and on the staff of diocesan agencies.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document