Political Advocacy Without a Choice

From social work’s early days, African American social workers were engaged in what today is termed as political social work, yet their work is often overlooked in both social work education and the broader retelling of our profession’s history. This article examines the early history of African American political social work, using Lane and Pritzker’s (2018) five domains of political social work. We outline ways in which African American social workers’ lived experiences led them to engage in political social work to support community survival and to challenge injustice during the Black Migration period post-slavery, the Jim Crow Era, and the Civil Rights Movement. Even as broader structural dynamics sought to exclude African Americans from the political arena, dynamic and influential African American social workers laid the groundwork for modern political social work. They politically engaged their communities, lobbied for legislation, worked in the highest levels of government, supported campaigns, and ran and held elective office to ensure that civil rights were given and maintained. This manuscript calls for a shift from social work’s white-dominant historical narrative and curricula (Bell, 2014; DeLoach McCutcheon, 2019) to assertive discussion of the historic roles African American political social work pioneers played in furthering political empowerment and challenging social injustice.

Dreams of a Black Commons on Turtle Island

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.

Introduction

The introduction uses Ruby McKnight Williams’s story after her arrival in California in the 1930s to present the themes and arguments of the book. Williams’s shock at the extent of segregation in her new home aligned with the experience of other black migrants and the introduction places her history in the context of black migration to the state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An overview of Jim Crow’s genesis during the era of statehood and the Gold Rush is followed by a discussion of African American resistance and the ways black bodies refused to follow the dictates of segregation. Organized resistance to black codes and antiblack practices put black Californians at the center of the state’s—and sometimes the nation’s—contestations over Jim Crow. An overview of the chapters is included.

“Too Tedious to Mention”: Pondering the Border, Black Atlantic, and Public Schooling in Colonial Canada

An advertisement for a “Negro man and boy” and “a variety of other articles too tedious to mention” for disposal” inspired this author to examine the “truly impossible, futile position for most black parents” in eighteenth and nineteenth century Canada. This article first examines how slaves were sold in a similar manner on both sides of the border by addressing the “many meanings of the border” to those involved with black migration in Canada. It then then examines a history of public schooling violence and legal case studies to evaluate the realities of those who faced “de facto practices of racial discrimination” when seeking an emancipated education for black families. By centering the realities evident in advertisements for slaves and public-school violence, I consider how Canadians were involved in the British Atlantic world slave trade and contributed to “an ongoing global project of subjugation and dispersal of African and African-descended peoples” by focusing on how racial public-school segregation responded to large-scale arrivals of black free and enslaved peoples in the late eighteenth and early to mid nineteenth centuries.

The “Grapevine Telegraph”

This chapter examines black agency during the immediate post-Civil War period of 1865-1871, a time in which African American movement and migration transforms the region. In the attempt to achieve a fuller measure of their freedom, black migrants leave Virginia and travel over the Appalachian Mountains into the newly formed state of West Virginia. Though free in the ostensibly anti-slavery state, racism impedes black aspiration. The chapter foregrounds the varied methods blacks utilize to ameliorate these barriers and constraints to build lives anew. It concludes that the primary purpose of black migration into the state and Huntington was not political or social gain but the acquisition of gainful employment affiliated with the establishment of the upstart Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.

Gone Home

Since the 2016 presidential election, Americans have witnessed countless stories about Appalachia: its changing political leanings, its opioid crisis, its increasing joblessness, and its declining population. These stories, however, largely ignore black Appalachian lives. Karida L. Brown’s Gone Home offers a much-needed corrective to the current whitewashing of Appalachia. In telling the stories of African Americans living and working in Appalachian coal towns, Brown offers a sweeping look at race, identity, changes in politics and policy, and black migration in the region and beyond. Drawn from over 150 original oral history interviews with former and current residents of Harlan County, Kentucky, Brown shows that as the nation experienced enormous transformation from the pre- to the post-civil rights era, so too did black Americans. In reconstructing the life histories of black coal miners, Brown shows the mutable and shifting nature of collective identity, the struggles of labor and representation, and that Appalachia is far more diverse than you think.