Out of the Shadows: Bringing African American Digital Collections Together in Umbra Search African American History

Voices of Black Folk: The Sermons of Rev. A. W. Nix, by Terri Brinegar

African American Satisfaction With the SNAP-Ed Program: A Qualitative Exploration

African American Perceptions of Service Provided by Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education: A Qualitative Exploration

An Examination of African American Women's Lives in Postwar Philadelphia Lisa Krissoff Boehm (bio) Lisa Levenstein . A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xvi + 199 pages. Illustrations, tables, maps, appendix, bibliography, and index. $35.96. This work, a part of the prestigious John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture, edited by Waldo E. Martin and Patricia Sullivan, makes a noteworthy contribution to the growing yet still underserved field of African American women's urban history. Levenstein's work is heartening on a number of levels, and we need more scholars to consider undertaking projects of this type. As I have argued in the Journal of Urban History's special January 2010 edition on teaching ("Adding Gender to American Urban History"), urban historians ought to produce works that cross subfields with greater frequency. Urban historians tend to craft books aimed at a narrow audience and seem hesitant to make theoretical or narrative leaps between genres. This hesitancy denies the field greater readership and historiographical impact. Urban history can be successfully merged with political, economic, environmental, gender, labor, immigration, African American, and other types of history. A Movement Without Marches is simultaneously a book about poverty, African American women, public policy, and postwar Philadelphia. The book openly draws inspiration from the likes of Thomas Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996) and Arnold R. Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1840-1960 (1998). Levenstein makes a very important contribution by studying what she terms "the gendered construction of racialized urban poverty" (p. 5). Levenstein writes about African American women in poverty, a topic that has proved onerous for many academics due to the stereotypes that must be confronted. Levenstein rejects the term "underclass," which "not only paints a false portrait of poor women's goals and values, but it also severely misconstrues their work habits. Regardless of their employment status, women who sought and retained assistance from public institutions were workers, first and foremost, because they labored to care for their households and [End Page 556] their families with few financial resources" (p. 24). Levenstein is upfront about addressing the ways in which the women may have exhibited traits commonly attributed to the underclass, admitting that the women "received public assistance, became pregnant unintentionally, suffered from depression, or used drugs and alcohol" (p. 24). Levenstein could point out here that these traits can be applied to a broad number of Americans—middle class as well as working class—especially when one considers how many Americans have relied on unemployment assistance at some time in their lives or made use of child tax credits or other financial relief. The author notes on page twenty-six that any study of African American women in poverty runs the risk of misinterpretation, given the broad range of negative stereotypes attributed to these women. The nature of the book necessitates a thorough exploration of the women's personal lives, and the author must divulge some unflattering stories. Extensive reliance on court records unearths very sensitive tales; however, Levenstein approaches her work with the utmost sensitivity and need not worry about being misinterpreted. In a clearly prepared table, Levenstein notes how the black population of Philadelphia expanded from 219,599 in 1930 to 529,239 by 1960. Much of this notable increase is due to the movement known as the Second Great Migration, which Levenstein does not refer to by name but mentions fleetingly in a few places in the book. The economic, cultural, and political aspects of the city that lured hundreds of thousands of southern migrants to settle there ought to be contrasted with the startling conditions the migrants encountered in their daily lives in Philadelphia. As return migration remained low, the North must have remained preferable in some ways. Migration studies and narratives, although there are relatively few focused strictly on women, have been a staple of postwar urban and African American history and ought to be further incorporated into this work. Reference to the conclusions of sociologist Stewart Tolnay, who refutes...

Reviewed by: African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture Jennifer Sieck Anne L. Bower (ed.), African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. 200 pp. Editor Anne L. Bower invites six scholars to bring a dish in the form of a chapter to African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture. Together they host a multi-course meal for readers hungry to learn about African American history and culture through the lens of food. The diversity of the dinner guests reflects the divergent disciplines to which African American culinary studies lends itself; experts around the table range from archaeologists to sociologists. The result is a recipe for a flavorful feast (and, notably, one attentive to presentation) that provides a solid foundation for exploring African American foodways. Bower, a retired English professor and author of Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories, introduces the collection of essays by examining the role of food in the motion picture Soul Food, observing that the Sunday dinner table acts as a barometer for the status of the African American family in the film. Bowers extends the metaphor to show how African American food offers a mirror to history and culture. By studying the history (part one of the book) and representations (part two) of African American food, she contends that scholars gain new insights not only into history and culture, but also into issues of race, gender, [End Page 1193] economics and politics. Though not a cookbook, Bowers includes a recipe for "Chicken and Collard Green Crêpes with Béchamel Sauce" at the conclusion of her introduction, enjoining readers, too, to participate in African American foodways (11). The value of studying food to yield greater meaning than, as the ad slogan puts it, "it's what's for dinner," echoes throughout the book. The author of chapter four, Doris Witt, likens food to music as a site for cultural expression, but critiques the limited recognition food receives related to its role in shaping history. Recapitulated in almost every chapter is the way that food is yet another example of African Americans' use of material culture to retain individual and group identities in the face of oppression. Though the book testifies to a distinctiveness in African American food, it also emphasizes the fusion of cultures blended by African Americans—African, Native American, and European—and the resulting influence that permeates American cuisine today. Finally, women and men play important roles in African American foodways past and present; however, a number of essays pay special attention to women's access to power in relation to food. In chapter one, Robert L. Hall notes that African foodways predate Alfred Crosby's notion of the Columbian Exchange by "hundreds, if not thousands of years" (17). He provides extensive documentation of crop exchanges to inform his inquiry into the relationship between food and the transatlantic slave trade. By asking what Africans ate and brought with them to the Americas, he attempts to determine how "African all Americans are" (18). Hall, a professor of African American studies and history, argues that enslaved Africans integrated their cultures into white southern culture because of their knowledge of growing crops such as rice and their role in preparing food on the plantation. They also maintained what Charles W. Joyner describes as "African culinary grammars" in their own food preparations which were separate from whites (31). Food and identity remained symbolically linked during slavery, a connection that continues today. Hall's concluding contention is reminiscent of Albert Raboteau's groundbreaking work in Slave Religion: foodways provide another instance in which African Americans creatively preserve African culture within the context of the slavery. William C. Whit riffs on similar themes in chapter two from his perspective as a sociologist, touching on how enslaved cooks influenced the evolution of white southern food culture and, more broadly, how "subordinated [End Page 1194] people used their own knowledge systems of the environment they settled to reshape the terms of their domination" (49). In these ways and others, Whit sees "soul food," a term coined in the 1960s to describe African American cuisine, "as constitutive of, and an exemplary performance of...

My purpose in compiling this book was to produce a “student-friendly” course book in African American Studies, the elective course I designed and introduced into the English Department curriculum at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš. The book is meant to provide a brief introduction into the history and culture of African Americans in the U.S., but could also be of interest to the general public, and, hopefully, may add to the practice of teaching African American literature and history already established at Serbian universities. The main purpose of the book is to get the readers/students acquainted with the key events in African American history, the most important political and cultural figures and the most prominent themes in African American culture. One of the goals would also be to spark further interest in this topic area and open possibilities for similar postgraduate academic courses. As most available books in African American studies deal either with history or literature, I have made an attempt to consider the subject from the perspective of cultural studies, integrating historical data with sociological, political and cultural commentary. I have deemed that such an integrative approach would provide the best insight into the study area and give the fullest picture of the African American contribution to the U.S. and world history and culture. The book is divided into eight chapters covering the period from the origins of the Atlantic slave trade to the contemporary period. The concept of individual chapters is as follows: an outline of the most important events, developments and historical figures of a particular period is followed by two or three brief excerpts from some of the most important works by major African American writers which illustrate the most important theme(s) covered in the chapter, accompanied by a brief commentary with topics and questions for further study.

Reviewed by: Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golfby Lane Demas Kathleen McElroy Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golf. By Lane Demas. John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xx, 363. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-3422-7.) Lane Demas's exhaustive book Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golfreveals that a sport considered the epitome of whiteness played a significant role in shaping the black experience in the United States. Golf courses were not just physical spaces for black leisure and racial uplift—they were strolling battlegrounds in the African American freedom struggle. The competing interests often, in golf parlance, left an uneasy lie. "Like the dread and forbidden topic of intermarriage, the golf question makes everyone uncomfortable," remarked the white wife of Walter White, the fair-skinned NAACP leader (p. 206). National civil rights leaders ebbed and flowed in their support for integrating municipal golf courses, so local black men and women usually led the fight to access what Demas calls "the largest swath of white-only space," especially in southern cities (p. 181). African Americans who were passionate about golf—a pastime the black press eagerly promoted—built private courses, played on sometimes subpar black-only public courses, and competed on the United Golfers Association (UGA) tour, similar to the American Tennis Association for black tennis players. Demas recounts the exploits of male golfers thwarted by the Professional Golf Association's "Caucasian clause," which lasted until 1961 (p. 117). Demas, a history professor at Central Michigan University, obligatorily ends Game of Privilegewith a thoughtful discussion about Tiger Woods, race, money, and the superstar's lasting contribution to America. To Demas, that contribution certainly is not to American golf, where the black presence has shrunk since Woods's dominance at the turn of the twenty-first century. Instead, Demas concentrates on proving that African Americans made significant contributions to golf (such as dentist George Franklin Grant, who in 1899 [End Page 1053]patented the golf tee) and that integrating the sport was more than a middle-class folly. Doing so held the threat of jail, as was the case for six black golfers in Greensboro, North Carolina. Demas argues—somewhat convincingly—that the Supreme Court victories in Simkins v. City of Greensboro(1957) and Holmes v. City of Atlanta(1955) were as or more significant to integrating public spaces than Brown v. Board of Education(1954). Trying to upheave civil rights legacies he cannot budge, Demas also calls a seminal 1941 protest round of golf through a segregated Washington, D.C., public course more meaningful than Marian Anderson's 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial. More troubling is his correct but loose usage of the word "militancy" in describing both the actions of black activists who used legislative means to desegregate courses and those who murdered eight white people at a St. Croix golf club (pp. 201, 189). Ignore Demas's insistence that the first African American to compete in the fledgling U.S. Open, John Shippen in 1896, should be as remembered as Jackie Robinson. Instead, appreciate Demas's narratives about the ways Robinson and Joe Louis elevated golf's significance in America. Shortly before Robinson reintegrated Major League Baseball, the black press touted golf as more tolerant than baseball because of one big-money, integrated event. By 1952, Louis, who backed UGA tournaments, declared "'war on Jim Crow in golf '" (p. 120). After retiring in 1957, Robinson could not join any of the prestigious country clubs in the New York area, failed in business ventures to develop an integrated course, and declared golf the "'only sport in which a Negro does not have an equal chance today'" (p. 127). Demas's research, use of images, extensive footnotes, and historical tables make Game of Privilegeinvaluable for researching leisure, African American and southern history, and, of course, golf itself. As he hopes, Game of Privilegeindeed should start conversations—academic and, one hopes, during rounds of golf—about the ways Americans think about the sport's influence on race, and vice versa. Kathleen McElroy...

Ira Dworkin’s fascinating survey of African American sensibilities about the Congo, Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State, is an enormously important book, breaking down the abstract gesture to the diaspora, or to “Africa,” and more tightly focusing our attention on one small region of outsized importance in that vast and variegated continent. One small region, that is, and the myriad political engagements, commitments, and movements that took up “the Congo” as a moral crisis, spotlighted it for all the world to see, and worked to use that illumination to change African American culture and to improve the conditions of black Africans and African-descended peoples everywhere. On a deeper level, Congo Love Song is, one must admit, not so much a revelation as it is an important contribution to a body of work that is already changing the way we do history. Over the last twenty years or so, African American history has been transformed by the transnational and by the diasporic. Following in the footsteps of major interdisciplinary scholars in transnational American history and American studies (the book opens with a discussion of the Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease collection Cultures of United States Imperialism [1993]), Dworkin hopes that his use of “the Congo as a visible site of American and African American engagement and counterengagement” will help to “[locate] colonialism, in all its political minutiae, at the heart of American culture from [the] early postbellum encounters through the Cold War and early years of postcolonialism” (15). Some readers—and especially those who’ve been working on this issue for a while, or who long ago accepted that empire was foundational to American political culture—may wonder at the originality of this ambition, and yet it is undeniably true that Dworkin is the very first to pull at this particular Congolese thread.

Graham Russell Hodges. Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863. (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 413. Cloth $45.00, paper $18.95 Hodges Graham Russell. Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863. (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 413. Cloth $45.00, paper $18.95. Joanne Pope Melish Joanne Pope Melish University of Kentucky Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 105, Issue 5, December 2000, Pages 1731–1732, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/105.5.1731 Published: 01 December 2000

Previous articleNext article No Access“PREMATURELY KNOWING OF EVIL THINGS”: THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN GIRLS AND YOUNG WOMEN IN SLAVERY AND FREEDOMWilma KingWilma KingWilma King is Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of American and African American History at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Search for more articles by this author Wilma King is Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of American and African American History at the University of Missouri, Columbia.PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 99, Number 3Summer 2014 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.99.3.0173 Views: 1297Total views on this site Copyright 2014 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Remembering Alton Parker Hornsby, Jr., 1940–2017

The main object of my paper is to co-relate the decoded signified idea of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Mestiza Consciousness of Gloria Andalzua with the referential detail from the text Beloved by Toni Morrison. The co-relating factor of both these theories is based on cause and effect issues. The decoded signified ideas of African-American history, myth, folklore, cultural values and moral codes have impacted a lot to shape an inclusive conscious idea which is close enough to the concept of “Third World Consciousness”. European history and theories alone are inadequate to express the true sense of African American culture, literature and its moral values. Toni Morrison’s basic concern “is to move beyond the systematic or structural patterns” of those theories and history ( Rigney 7). The African American ethnic community has always suffered from an identity crisis caused by the past slave tradition, racism, sexism, dehumanized moral and cultural values. In Beloved, Morrison depicted an indigenous social, cultural, moral and literal value of life which aims for developing a higher consciousness, a kind of wisdom. Morrison attempted to break the boundary of subject-object duality that caged her for a long term. Through the text Beloved, Toni Morrison made a universal appeal to restore and re-establish the indigenousness of the African American community. But the sense of restoring and revaluing one’s indigenousness will remain an incomplete guidance unless one comes across with higher consciousness. In developing a sense of higher consciousness or a “new consciousness” the role of “Mestiza Consciousness” theory of Gloria Andalzua is an interdependent important factor. The most important legacy of an ethnic community is language. Basically racism or color line problems are the root cause behind the traumatic crisis of African American people. Undoubtedly, “there is no racism without language” (Pramod K. Nayar, 224) Morrison assumed the vibrancy of language which is a definite obstruction in reshaping a kind of higher consciousness among the African-American ethnic community. The decoded signified ideas of African American history, culture, myth and folklore develop a higher consciousness of protest literature and culture to reestablish indigenousness in an inclusive environment of lively experiences.

To Make an Old Century New Tess Chakkalakal (bio) Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. By John Ernest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 336 pages. $59.95 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. By P. Gabrielle Foreman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 280 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $25.00 (paper). Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. By Eric Gardner. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009. 258 pages. $50.00 (cloth). A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. By Stephen G. Hall. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 334 pages. $65.00 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel. By Edlie L. Wong. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 337 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $24.00 (paper). A decade has passed since Elizabeth McHenry declared in this journal’s pages that “the more we know about the range of activities and strategies of resistance used by early black Americans as they worked toward a society that was both multiracial and equal increases the accuracy and sophistication of American cultural history.”1 McHenry’s 2002 book, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies, elaborates upon her earlier claim and now five new studies of nineteenth-century African American literature and history continue to broaden our knowledge of early black Americans and African American culture through the recovery of forgotten or neglected writings.2 All five, in different yet compatible ways, document and supplement the turn away from vernacular and oral forms of African American expression that were once central to the formation and study of African American culture. [End Page 1001] It was after all the “discovery” of black spirituals in the mid-nineteenth century, as Jon Cruz explains in Culture on the Margins (1999), “that helped to install the modern hermeneutical orientation toward cultural practices” (3). Although it was Frederick Douglass who first noted the importance of the spirituals to the formation of the black community, it was not until the twentieth century that they became the focus of cultural study. Renaming the form “sorrow songs” in his 1903 study The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B Du Bois situated them at the center of American history and culture. That claim would be echoed by the unnamed protagonist of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, who devotes himself to recovering and transcribing the songs of rural southern blacks in his attempt to “catch the spirit of the Negro in his relatively primitive state.”3 Though developed during the nineteenth century as a response to the social and economic conditions of slavery, black religious music as an authentic form of African American culture was largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. Most notable is the work of Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates, which has illuminated both the meaning and significance of the black vernacular to African American literature and cultural production. Partially influenced by the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Baker and Gates’s theories of African American literature rely on oral forms, particularly music, to understand not only the meaning of what Gates calls “the black text,” but also the relationship between white and black forms of American culture. While relying on written texts, these critics helped to broaden the idea of literature to include vernacular forms of cultural expression rooted in slave experience. Hence, the formation of an African American literary canon that begins with spirituals, slave narratives, sermons, and folktales. That twentieth-century idea of the black vernacular has been slowly eclipsed in the twenty-first century by an emphasis on print culture, or what Wilson J. Moses calls “a literate tradition.”4 Focusing instead on a wide variety of forms of print culture that include not just novels, poems, and plays but also periodicals and legal cases, all five authors reviewed here share McHenry’s desire to dispel “the myth of the monolithic black community” by expanding our knowledge of early forms of black print culture (15). Recovering and...

This paper explores the intricate relationship between African American history, culture, and literature, highlighting how African American literary works serve as a profound reflection of the community's historical and cultural journey. By examining significant historical periods such as slavery, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, and contemporary issues, the paper delves into the impact of these events on African American identity and cultural expression. Additionally, it analyzes the representation of African American cultural elements like music, oral traditions, and religious practices in literature. Through a detailed examination of selected literary works, the paper reveals how African American authors articulate the complexities of their experiences, capturing themes of resilience, resistance, and identity. This study underscores the importance of literature in preserving and conveying the rich history and culture of African Americans, offering a deeper understanding of their enduring struggle for justice and equality.

Today well over two hundred museums focusing on African American history and culture can be found throughout the United States and Canada. Many of these institutions trace their roots to the 1960s and 1970s, when the struggle for racial equality inspired a movement within the black community to make the history and culture of African America more public. This book tells the story of four of these groundbreaking museums: the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago (founded in 1961); the International Afro-American Museum in Detroit (1965); the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, D.C. (1967); and the African American Museum of Philadelphia (1976). Andrea A. Burns shows how the founders of these institutions, many of whom had ties to the Black Power movement, sought to provide African Americans with a meaningful alternative to the misrepresentation or utter neglect of black history found in standard textbooks and most public history sites. Through the recovery and interpretation of artifacts, documents, and stories drawn from African American experience, they encouraged the embrace of a distinctly black identity and promoted new methods of interaction between the museum and the local community. Over time, the black museum movement induced mainstream institutions to integrate African American history and culture into their own exhibits and educational programmes. This often controversial process has culminated in the creation of a National Museum of African American History and Culture, now scheduled to open in the nation's capital in 2015.