“PREMATURELY KNOWING OF EVIL THINGS”: THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN GIRLS AND YOUNG WOMEN IN SLAVERY AND FREEDOM

Remembering Alton Parker Hornsby, Jr., 1940–2017

This article explores in four sections the logic and impact of the ways in which all archival collections, but African American collections most poignantly, are incomplete; and how a national search engine for African American history confronts and attempts to address the absence of African American stories, voices, documents, and histories. Following the work of scholars such as Verne Harris, Michelle Caswell, and others, the first section analyzes how and why archives are always necessarily incomplete, as well as the particular reasons behind the bias and erasure of and within African American history and the archives that have come to collect and represent it. The second section discusses how Umbra Search African American History (umbrasearch.org) was conceived as a response to the need for a more complete archival record of African American history and culture. Section three presents Umbra Search as a case study—what it is, how it has grown, the role of partners, and the challenges it faces. The final section considers the roles of academic and community collections, technology, and collaboration in creating access to a deeper and more fulsome representation of American history and culture.

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...

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

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...

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...

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Challenging Dissemblance in Pauli Murray Historiography, Sketching a History of the Trans New Negro

"StrangeLove": Searchingfor Sexual Subjectivities in Black PrintPopular Cultureduringthe 1950s Leisa D. Meyer Myrtle Hartgrove, Atlanta, GA—Dear Editor: I just finished glanc ing through your first issue of Tan Confessions, and frankly I feel that you've gone to a lot of trouble to waste a lot of valuable paper. What is the point behind the whole thing? Those stories that you call "true to life," are simply impossible. No self-respecting woman with an ounce of decency would allow any of those things to happen to her that you have published as "the truth." You should be ashamed to advertise such trash on the same page with such honorable publi cations as Ebony and Negro Digest. Jane White, Los Angeles, CA—Dear Editor: Thanks a lot for coming out with your new magazine, Tan Confessions. I am a long time buyer of romantic magazines and while I know that they are trash I would much rather spend my money for "colored trash" than "white trash."1 The disparate reactions of myrtle hartgrove and jane white to the firstissue of Tan Confessions indicate that the sexuality rendered in this monthly publication's intimate stories was deeply contested ter rain for African American readers. I seek in this essay to analyze more broadly such contestations, drawing on a range of articles, letters, and responses in black popular culture magazines in the period immedi ately following World War II. Through an interrogation of the negoti ations among individuals and within groups, we can see the complex and diverse sexual subjectivities (or potential subjectivities) of African American women as they are articulated, debated, weighed, explored, FeministStudies38, no. 3 (Fall 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 625 626 Leisa D. Meyer reconfigured, and at times, rejected. What becomes clear through this material is that while there was an explicit and often direct engage ment with white normative cultural presumptions concerning Afri can American sexuality, there were also alternative racialized sexual subjectivities that were explicitly proposed, discussed, and debated within these pages. Myrtle Hartgrove's comments hold up the "decent" and "self respecting" woman as a bulwark against the "trash"—stories of black women's romantic and sexual encounters — offered in the pages of Tan Confessions. Hartgrove's invocation of respectability guards against the longstanding racist trope of hypersexuality and its concomitant insinuation that African American women are not "respectable."2 Many African American women refuted the racist hypersexual image in order to protect themselves and their daughters from its conse quences and also to assert desire and claim their sexuality and sexual subjectivity. Hartgrove here engages in a "politics of respectability"— historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's oft-cited phrase describing African American women's promotion of restrained behavior, espe cially restrained sexual behavior, as a "strategy of reform" during the early twentieth century. For Higginbotham, this strategy enabled African American women to "define themselves outside the param eters of prevailing racist discourses."3 Historian Paisley Harris on the other hand has critiqued this strategy and its consequences, charac terizing the politics of respectability as having a "gatekeeping func tion" that established a "behavioral entrance fee" for membership in African American communities. While this "entrance fee" offered some challenge to hegemonic cultural views of African Americans, it also constructed and maintained status distinctions within African American communities.4 Subsequent studies of African American women's lives and sex ualities have expanded this understanding of the "gatekeeping func tion" of respectability beyond the particular historical moment that Higginbotham explores. As Michele Mitchell suggests in her essay on African American women's history, it is "important to ponder whether African Americanists who theorize gender and sexuality have fomented new silences." She goes on to note her "lurking suspicions" that "certain subjects are avoided because they have been deemed Leisa D. Meyer 627 either dangerous or damaging" and voices her "uneasfe] about the costs attached to this particular quiet."5 Literary scholar Matt Richardson also speaks to the problems of these silences in African American history: The tradition of representing Black people as decent and moral his torical agents has meant the erasure of the broad array of Black sex uality and gendered being in favor of a...

Previous article No AccessRecent Books on African American Educational History William H. Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865-1954 William H. Watkins, James H. Lewis, and Victoria Chou, eds., Race and Education: The Roles of History and Society in Educating African American Students Karen A. Johnson, Uplifting the Women and the Race: The Educational Philosophies and Social Activism of Anna Julia Cooper and Nannie Helen Burroughs Anna Victoria Wilson and William E. Seagall, Oh, Do I Remember! Experiences of Teachers during the Desegregation of Austin's Schools, 1964-1971 Vivian Gunn Morris and Curtis L. Morris, The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community Adam Fairclough, Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow Henry N. Drewry and Humphrey Doermann, Stand and Prosper: Private Black Colleges and Their Students Robert A. Pratt, We Shall Not Be Moved: The Desegregation of the University of Georgia Maurice C. Daniels, Horace T. Ward: Desegregation of the University of Georgia, Civil Rights Advocacy, and JurisprudenceV. P. FranklinV. P. Franklin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 87, Number 4Fall 2002New Perspectives on African American Educational History A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/1562476 Views: 26Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: John A. Kirk THE NAACP CAMPAIGN FOR TEACHERS' SALARY EQUALIZATION: AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN EDUCATORS AND THE EARLY CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE, The Journal of African American History 94, no.44 (Nov 2017): 529–552.https://doi.org/10.1086/JAAHv94n4p529

BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 80, NO. 2 | 27 80 No.2 AFRICAN AMERICAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS: HISTORICAL DOCUMENTATION AND PRESERVATION IN CEMETERIES By Sarah Lane Within eyesight of my grandfather’s US Navy plaque was a large field with a few dilapidated headstones. This was the historical “colored section” of Washington Cemetery.TherewerenobrightUSflags.Thisdidnotconvey messages of honor or thankfulness from the community for the service of African American veterans. African American veterans in cemeteries across the nation have lacked deserved recognition. Not only is this disparaging to the African American community and families of veterans, but also, without correction, it passes on division among future generations. In the Civil War, over 200,000 African American soldiers and sailors served in the US Army and Navy.1 They served in 163 units that mainly fell under the moniker United States Colored Troops (USCT). Units of African American soldiers began forming as early as 1862. African American Civil War soldiers were given inferior equipment and low pay, and the highest achievable rank was sergeant major.2 However, African American soldiers and sailors held to their determination to fight the chains of oppression; twenty-one-year-old private Samuel Cabble wrote, “I am a soldier now and i shall use my utmost endeavor to strike at the rebellion and the heart of this system that so long has kept us in chains.”3 Despite their bravery and determination, historically, African American Civil War veterans were not fully recognized, and many of their histories have gone untold. Over 150 years after the Civil War, this discrepancy has begun to be addressed through local and national efforts. I had the privilege of being a part of Paul LaRue’s Research History course at Washington High School in Washington Court House, Ohio. The goal of the course was to bring to light little-known history, with a focus on African American history. Some of the most meaningful work I engaged in was researching and documenting the histories of African American veterans buried in local cemeteries. Prior to my arrival in the course, a 2002–2003 class installed a new row of headstones, called Soldier’s Row, for most of the African American Civil War veterans in Washington Cemetery. This was the unattended area I described earlier; now the headstones for African Americans who served in the Civil War stand upright, with flags and proper honors. There is an Ohio historical marker located there (with text written by students) that includes a quotation by USCT veteran Albert Bird, “We have suffered to save the Country; we ought to be remembered.”4 We engaged in similar work in Beech Grove Cemetery near Cincinnati, Ohio. We did not need to take a trip to Gettysburg; there was untold history in our local community cemeteries. In Beech Grove Cemetery, we were actively conserving the history of African American veterans. I was part of a group who documented as many headstones as possible via photograph, leading to the creation of a digital map of the cemetery. My peers and I hoped to spark even greater change and recognition for these soldiers. Carl Westmoreland, senior historian at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and a representative from the Ohio Department of Veterans Services, visited our class. Imagine the difference that can be made if more teachers took the initiative to engage students in documenting and recognizing the contributions of African American veterans. Nationally, similar history documentation and recognition work is being done, including efforts by the National Park Service (NPS). Overall, African American heritage and history continues to be recognized, documented, and honored throughout NPS sites and programs. In 1991, an African burial ground (used in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries) was discovered in New York City. An African Burial Ground National Monument was erected, and in 1993 it became a National Historical Landmark.5 The National Park Service’s efforts have also focused on the documentation and recognition of African American Civil War veterans. In 1997, the Spirit of Freedom statue, also known as the African American Civil War Memorial, was created. It has a wall of soldiers’names and is located in Washington, DC.6 The NPS provides a Civil...

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

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsPaul Harvey, Bounds of Their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Pp. 264. $53.00 (cloth); $24.00 (paper).Rachael L. PasierowskaRachael L. PasierowskaRice University Search for more articles by this author Rice UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 104, Number 2Spring 2019LGBT Themes in African American History A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/702429 Views: 59Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article No AccessQueering the Black Church: Notes from the Black Press, 1945–1960Gregory ConerlyGregory Conerly Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 104, Number 2Spring 2019LGBT Themes in African American History A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/702438 Views: 356Total views on this site © 2019 by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.