Queering the Black Church: Notes from the Black Press, 1945–1960

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.

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.

Previous articleNext article FreeFront MatterPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 107, Number 2Spring 2022Reconsidering the Uses of Violence in African American History A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/720955 Views: 34Total views on this site © 2022 Association for the Study of African American Life and History. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBlack Bodies on Lockdown: AIDS Moral Panic and the Criminalization of HIV in Times of White InjuryRené EsparzaRené Esparza 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/10.1086/702415 Views: 1160Total 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.

Previous articleNext article No Access“To Stamp Out the Oppression of All Black People”: Ron Grayson and the Association of Black Gays, 1975–1979Kevin C. QuinKevin C. Quin 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/10.1086/702439 Views: 303Total 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.

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.

Remembering Alton Parker Hornsby, Jr., 1940–2017

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

Homes On-the-Road, Terrorized Cabins, and Prophetic Nightmare-scapesEmma J. Ray's Unsettling Western Fantasies Shelly Jarenski (bio) Despite almost thirty years of scholarship on women's experience in the mythic West of the United States, scholarship that began in many ways with Annette Kolodny's The Land Before Her, the frontier myth continues to conjure gendered notions of pioneerism, nonconformity, and adventure. Even when the gendered aspects of this myth are challenged, the American West that most people imagine is still inherently white. In many ways the story of African American women's experience as agents in one of the most palpable fantasies of American belonging has been obscured or erased.1 This erasure has given us an inaccurate sense of both the United States' and African American history. As Eric Gardner's recent work has powerfully documented, this erasure has also given us a truncated definition of African American literary history, one that is limited to the long-form stories of enslaved and ex-enslaved people in rural southern and urban northeastern geographies. And, as Kolodny argues, it has caused the prevailing fantasy of the United States' frontier to be one of "privatized erotic mastery" rather than one of a "home and familial human community within a cultivated garden" (xiii); and, to extend Kolodny, the dominance of one fantasy over the other has fueled realities of genocide and environmental exploitation. Finally, this erasure has limited our perceptions of who belongs in the nation's narratives, defining who gets to be a "real American" and who does not. However, placing African American women's narratives at the center of our study of American western literature presents a counternarrative to the mythic West by re-centering feminized ideologies of community, care, and cooperation into the pioneer fantasy, [End Page 381] including reimagining these feminized ideologies into environmental relationships. Re-centering African American women's narratives of the West also shifts African American literary history, extending it beyond rural southern and urban northeastern geographies. And, of course, re-centering African American women's narratives in our study of American western literature allows us to reimagine national belonging. This essay aims to unsettle some of our conceptions of belonging, and of the West, by studying the 1926 memoir of Seattle-based, formerly enslaved evangelical reformer and itinerant preacher Emma J. Ray, titled Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed: Autobiography of Mr. and Mrs. L. P. Ray.2 Although Ray's narrative conforms to masculine aspects of the frontier fantasy at times, more often it breaks with those norms by positing decidedly feminized ideals of resistance and coming of age. For example, Ray and her husband, L. P., find their second freedom—that is, salvation—by conforming to the norms of temperance, service, and grace. Also, Ray transitions from a meek, passive, and placating woman at the beginning of the narrative to an outspoken leader by the end, and she does so through her reliance on Black, often female, communities of piety, such as the Colored Women's Christian Temperance Union and Methodist tent revivals, rather than through any kind of isolationist self-reliance or trials with the landscape. Ray's coming of age in the midst of communities is a reversal of the "solitary Black westerner" stereotype defined by Quintard Taylor as "a solitary figure loosened from moorings of family, home, and community" (qtd. in Johnson 11). Ray's reversal and resituation of this stereotype is crucial for the way we imagine race as well as gender, as Michael Johnson argues that this figure functions imaginatively to "transcen[d] race in part by separating himself from the black (eastern) community to become a member of white (western) society" (11). Ray's coming of age is instead embedded in western, Black, religious communities led by women. In addition to these racialized and feminized modes of resistance, Ray deploys three connected, deeply unsettling themes in her autobiography: mobility, domesticity, and the environmental imaginary. These themes were of crucial importance to those people who were held in bondage's post-emancipation realities, and they have [End Page 382] special resonance for women in the context of the mythic West. These themes are unsettling in Ray...

This chapter shows how recent scholarly writing is bringing gender from the margin to the center of scholarship on race and religion and proposes new areas for research in American Indian, Latina/o, Asian American, and African American histories. These recent and future publications use intersectional and interdisciplinary methods to transform categories of scholarly analysis, namely those of religion, racial violence, and politics. This chapter broadly examines the state of this field of gender, race, and religion in American history and then turns to a case study of one of the field’s best developed areas, African American religious history, to show how attention to gender is changing the terms of scholarly conversation.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsStefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020. Pp. 244. $110.00 (cloth); $28.00 (paper).Daniel LivesayDaniel LivesayClaremont McKenna College (USA) 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 107, Number 2Spring 2022Reconsidering the Uses of Violence in African American History A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/718698 Views: 38Total 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 AccessBook ReviewsMatthew Pettway, Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. Pp. 325. $30.00 (paper).Nathan H. DizeNathan H. DizeOberlin College (USA) 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 107, Number 2Spring 2022Reconsidering the Uses of Violence in African American History A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/718705 Views: 15Total 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 AccessBook ReviewsDeborah Gray White, Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. 272. $24.95 (paper).Taulby EdmondsonTaulby EdmondsonVirginia Tech Search for more articles by this author Virginia TechPDFPDF 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/10.1086/702431 Views: 38Total 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 AccessBook ReviewsDaniel S. Lucks, Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014. Pp. 394. $35.00 (cloth).David C. DennardDavid C. DennardEast Carolina University Search for more articles by this author East Carolina 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/10.1086/702434 Views: 177Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.