THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: AN INTRODUCTION

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

Bookended by remarks from African American diplomats Walter C. Carrington and Charles Stith, this book uses close readings of speeches, letters, historical archives, diaries, memoirs of policymakers, and newly available FBI files to confront much-neglected questions related to race and foreign relations in the United States. Why, for instance, did African Americans profess loyalty and support for the diplomatic initiatives of a nation that undermined their social, political, and economic well-being through racist policies and cultural practices? The book explores African Americans' history in the diplomatic and consular services and the influential roles of cultural ambassadors like Joe Louis and Louis Armstrong. It concludes with an analysis of the effects on race and foreign policy in the administration of Barack Obama. Groundbreaking and critical, the book expands on the scope and themes of recent collections to offer the most up-to-date scholarship to students in a range of disciplines, including U.S. and African American history, Africana studies, political science, and American studies.

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

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...

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...

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.

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.

The Handy African American History Answer Book, by Jessie Carney Smith. Canton, OH: Visible Ink Press, 2014, 432 pp., $21.95, paperback.This unique Q/A book gathers more than 700 stories, events, expressions, facts, and things everyone should know about the African American history and popular culture. The author, Dr. Jessie Carney Smith, is professor and librarian at Fisk University in Nashville. The author of numerous scholarly works and contributor for many encyclopedias, this is her fourth book about African American culture with this publisher.This Handy African American History Answer Book juxtaposes questions and answers, but most topics will probably be unknown to readers, even for those familiar with African American studies. In that sense, this rigorous book is not firstly made for quizzes or guessing games among friends, rather for studying and discovering the many dimensions of cross-cultural and race studies with the U.S. context.The 14 sections are thematically organized, highlighting the important dimensions of African American life and contribution in Arts, Business, Civil Rights, Education, plus ten other fields. However, this vast repertoire is not meant to just praise the many achievements by noted African Americans in various domains; its strength is to aptly explain the often hidden dimensions of everyday African American life over the past five centuries. Since one finds an average of two questions in about every page, answers are not too short but rather detailed and nuanced. More importantly, this guide also provides timely explanations about the symbolic significance of events or places that general dictionaries cannot easily contextualize. For example, the entry about the Apollo Theater in Harlem indicates that it was not just a building located on 125th Street in New York City, adding that It was one of the first theaters in the nation to feature Black artists and to be available to other minorities (p. 32).The fifth section on Education contains a great diversity of topics and many good surprises. For example, what is referred to as the Rock Nine were the nine heroic Black students who in the context of school desegregation during 1957 dared to integrate the Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and thereby proved their courageous self-restraint in the face of extreme provocation and peril (p. 124). Elsewhere, after the question Who was the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard University? we find a praising presentation of educator and author W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), who received his Ph.D. in history in 1895. Almost three decades later, the first three African American women to ever earn a doctoral degree have graduated in 1921. But the first Black student to ever graduate (at any level) from the University of Alabama was Vivian Malone Jones, in 1965. Sadly, Jessie Carney Smith adds that Miss Malone Jones and a Black colleague had to be escorted by the National Guard to register (p. 117). And that was only half a century ago.Further on, one learns that the first public school for Blacks opened in 1870 in Virginia. …

Introduction Mae G. Henderson In 1968, Sterling Stuckey was invited to Carleton College, a small midwestern liberal arts college in Minnesota, located in the town where Jesse James and his gang staged the “Great Northfield Raid.” The occasion was Black History Month, and Stuckey, a gifted African American historian of considerable eloquence, brought with him an impassioned message that was rousing to the handful of black undergraduates in that mainly white, idyllically-situated ivy tower in the nation’s heartland. Black Studies, he proclaimed, was coming of age! For a young black co-ed earning her way through college by means of a scholarship and work study, his voice embodied something close to the Living Word. She hailed him as a prophet who had found her in the wilderness. His message delivered her from the fires of the flaming white furnace, from the belly of the great white whale. Upon hearing him, she realized that she had survived the freshman dread, sophomore slump, junior jitters, and now senior scruples—had, indeed, studied four years of history, literature, philosophy and education—without ever even once having encountered in the classroom or curriculum a book, article, or scholarly note of any kind referring to the life and culture of African Americans. Pip and Jim didn’t count, although, to her credit, she had, on her own, read Ellison, Baldwin, and Wright during an illness and convalescence that had confined her to a dorm room during the winter of her third year. This was the fortuitous happenstance that changed the course of my graduate study and subsequently, the course of my career that winter, now more than a quarter of a century ago. Of course, my own story is a tale twice told: It must have been the same for numberless other budding, young “black scholars” in historically black as well as predominantly white colleges and universities during the late 1960s and early 1970s who, as it were, received “the call.” Like others, I responded with an ardency matched only by the urgency of the appeal. And despite some no doubt benevolent and well-meaning advice from a favored English professor, I proceeded to apply (with skeptical support from my mentor) to a graduate program where I knew I could study African American history and culture. I chose the American Studies Program at Yale because I knew that a small cohort of black scholars was there building an undergraduate Afro-American Studies Program. (There were no graduate programs in African American Studies anywhere in the United States at that time.) Many of the black students of my generation at Yale worked with the historian John Blassingame, whom we thought to be the Black Scholar par excellence, and who, by precept and example, prepared us to enter the black professorate. During the early 1970s, the Yale program expanded to include a Master of Arts in Teaching, and achieved national recognition as one of the leading Black Studies programs in the country. It was an exciting and heady time to be a young black student—to meet and rub shoulders, chat and dispute with artists and writers like Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, June Jordan, Jay Wright, Sterling Brown, [End Page 57] Robert Hayden, Dorothy West, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed, and others who held court at the Friday afternoon “teas” over which the master of Calhoun College, Charles Davis, presided with much elegance (Davis was fond of quipping that he was “master” of Calhoun). Such occasions provided rare opportunities for students to encounter writers and artists who were defining the field. These were the founding years of Black Studies at Yale, characterized (like the history of African Americans in this country) by triumphs and defeats in the course of its institutionalization into the academy nationwide. What we learned, more than anything else, was how a history of oppression had produced a legacy of survival and a culture of creativity. Our collective memory, however, must not let us forget that Black Studies was the academic component of a much larger political and cultural project, one that included the Black Power as well as the Black Arts movements. As such, its significance...

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...

African American culture draws upon a rich body of traditions from Africa, Latin America, and the South, and folklore is fundamental to the African American heritage. The first work of its kind, this definitive encyclopedia comprehensively overviews African American folklore. Included are roughly 700 alphabetically arranged entries by more than 100 expert contributors on such topics as folktales, music, art, foodways, spiritual beliefs, proverbs, and many other subjects. Entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia concludes with a bibliography of major works. African American folklore has played a dominant role in shaping the spirit and soul of the Americas. African American folk traditions are a vital part of contemporary society and continue to shape art, music, film, literature, and religion. Because folklore is more than just a body of tales and instead encompasses all of traditional culture, it is central to African American daily life. The first work of its kind, this authoritative encyclopedia comprehensively overviews African American folklore. While the encyclopedia gives special attention to music, art, folktales, spiritual beliefs, foodways, proverbs, and other topics central to African American folklore, it also discusses the Caribbean and African roots of traditional African American culture. Features: ; Draws upon the work of more than 100 expert contributors. ; Includes roughly 700 alphabetically arranged entries. ; Covers music, art, folktales, spiritual beliefs, foodways, proverbs, customs, traditions, and other topics. ; Entries cite works for further reading. ; Includes an alphabetical list of entries. ; Provides a list of entries grouped in topical categories. ; Lists archives and research centers. ; Offers convenient access through an extensive index. ; Entries are fully cross-referenced. ; Presents a selected, general bibliography of major works on African American folklore. ; Includes entries on the Caribbean and African roots of African American folklore. ; Overviews the presence of African American folklore in contemporary popular culture. ; Contains a generous selection of illustrations of all types of African American folklore. Benefits: ; Helps students understand the heart of African American culture. ; Provides an essential context for African American history, literature, music, and art. ; Promotes respect for cultural diversity. ; Celebrates our nation's African American heritage. ; Relates African American culture to its Caribbean and African influences. ; Serves as a model for student writing. ; Develops research skills by directing students to additional resources. ; Helps students learn about African American history through popular culture. Students researching any aspect of the African American experience will find this encyclopedia to be a valuable resource, as will their teachers. And because African American life is central to American society, anyone interested in American Studies will treasure this reference work.

This article examines and theorizes the function of African American history as a valuable African American Studies' core subject area by analyzing the scholarship and historical worldviews of a group of influential African American historians. Although they did not formally earn doctorates in history, at various points from the early 1960s until the mid-1980s, Malcolm X, the recently deceased Harold Cruse, Angela Davis, and Lerone Bennett, Jr., helped validate African American history as an essential core subject area of African American Studies. Challenging conventional Eurocentric notions of what the historian and history constitutes in U.S. academic culture, this article demonstrates (a) how Malcolm, Cruse, Davis, and Bennett embraced the Afrocentric view of history's function as a pragmatic tool for African American liberation and consciousness building and (b) how they provided insightful historical epistemologies, conceptualizations of African American history, and analyses of the African American experience.

Remembering Alton Parker Hornsby, Jr., 1940–2017

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