What is African American history?

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.

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2 the order in a period when white supremacy, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism were widely shared.Appropriately,Baker points out that themes of declension,secular and religious enemies, and codified patriotism still figure in American public discourse. David A. Horowitz Portland State University Perseverance: A History of African Americans in Oregon’s Marion and Polk Counties by Sheridan McCarthy and Stanton Nelson Oregon Northwest Black Pioneers, Salem, Oregon, 2011. Illustrations, maps, tables, index. 279 pages. $25.00 paper. Perseverance is a brief history of AfricanAmericans in two Oregon counties from 1788 through thepresent.Basedonresearchconductedbythe Oregon Northwest Black Pioneers (ONBP), a heritage organization based in Salem, Oregon, the completed work is clearly a labor of love by all who were involved in its production. Indeed, the ONBP has done yeoman’s work in researching and collecting the scattered, fragmented, and obscure material necessary to reconstruct the lives and experiences of a group of people often overlooked in the telling of Oregon’s history. Perseverance contains biographical profiles of a number of Marion and Polk counties’ African-descended pioneers, many of whom walked as slaves along the wagon trails leading to Oregon Territory. Those black pioneers managed to carve out lives for themselves in spite of the inhospitable environment in this territory (and, after 1859, state), where their presence either as slaves or as free people was not welcome.It was not until 1927 that Oregon repealed the law, written into its constitution, that forbade blacks from residing in the state. Although slavery’s demise and the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution voided Oregon’s exclusion law, African Americans in the state faced an uphill battle in obtaining acknowledgement and acceptance by the state’s white majority well into the twentieth century. Marion and Polk Counties were no exception . Black people there struggled to maintain equal access to education, work, housing, and leisure spaces. Individuals occasionally managed to break through the walls of prejudice and interacted with whites on common ground. More frequently, blacks attempted to create and sustain their own communities of support,though their relatively small numbers then and now made and make such associations difficult to sustain in the long term. In spite of the odds, in recent years, African Americans in both counties have obtained a degree of success and recognition for their contributions to their communities. Perseverance concludes by highlighting the achievements of some of this most recent generationof AfricanAmericansinOregon.Avaluable companion to Elizabeth McLagan’s 1980 work A Peculiar Paradise: A History of Blacks in Oregon, 1788–1940 and other histories of blacks in Oregon, Perseverance is recommended for anyone wishing to learn a bit more about the African American experience in Oregon. Melissa Stuckey University of Oregon Don’t miss Culture Captured: the Photography of Marian Wood Kolisch on view at the Oregon Historical Society through September 2. Details at www.ohs.org/exhibits ...

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.

In February 1926, a broad collection of schools and communities in the United States celebrated Negro History Week for the first time. For the next 50 years, Negro History Week continued to grow in scope and to develop as a launching pad for other initiatives designed to popularize the study of African American history. In 1976, as the United States commemorated its bicentennial, Negro History Week expanded to Afro-American History Month. Since then, each February, schools around the country have continued to recognize an annual celebration of what is now called Black History Month. Like other “set-aside” months (for example, Women’s History Month), Black History Month has its share of supporters and detractors. Its advocates do not consider Black History Month an end in itself; they continue to work toward the goal of a social studies curriculum that fully integrates Black history within courses taught through-out the year. Carter G. Woodson, the educator and historian who first developed the idea of Negro History Week in 1926, spent much of his professional life working toward this same goal. In this chapter, I explore the early years of Negro History Week and examine both Woodson’s rationale for the initiative as well as his vision for its implementation as a platform to serve more far-reaching curricular goals.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

Remembering Alton Parker Hornsby, Jr., 1940–2017

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

Reviewed by: Reclaiming the Black Past: The Use and Misuse of African American History in the Twenty-First Century by Pero Gaglo Dagbovie Chanté Baker Martin Reclaiming the Black Past: The Use and Misuse of African American History in the Twenty-First Century. By Pero Gaglo Dagbovie. (London and New York: Verso, 2018. Pp. xiv, 224. $26.95, ISBN 978-1-78663-203-6.) In this study, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie explores how “spokespersons and public figures outside of the ranks of professionally trained historians” have “at least as much (if not more) influence on the general public’s impressions of black history than the vast majority of historians of the black past do” (p. xii). Dagbovie argues that these influencers have huge sway in shaping current discourses around the black past. The opening chapter evaluates President Barack H. Obama and how he “interpreted, portrayed, sampled from, and even manipulated African American history,” tactics the author claims have been largely ignored by scholars (p. 5). Dagbovie traces the evolution of Obama’s “calculated” rhetoric, pointing out how his manner of addressing black history made him a master at “style-shifting” (pp. xiii, 15). These switches often resulted in Obama rendering a benign treatment of black history to white people and an often scolding account to black people. Obama’s strategic rhetoric is also part of Dagbovie’s argument in chapter 2. Here, the author presents how long-standing debates regarding the relevance and longevity of Black History Month appear in contemporary conversations. As Dagbovie rightly contends, current discussions join ongoing conversations that originated with Negro History Week. The push to extend the week to a longer observance is rooted in the Black Power era, when activists saw Negro History Week as an opportunity for a temporal acknowledgment of black Americans’ contributions and for a formal inclusion of these accomplishments in American history. Opponents disagreed with elevating past achievements and favored honoring “‘living black history’” (p. 58). Dagbovie contends that a focus on the present informs current efforts to promote the future—a push known as Black Futures Month. [End Page 541] In chapter 3, Dagbovie analyzes how certain commercially successful films have rendered aspects of the black experience. For example, he rightly critiques the failure of the film The Help (2011) to explore the real danger of sexual assault and other forms of harassment experienced by black domestic workers, and Dagbovie offers insight into the criticism given to Django Unchained (2012) by its director’s claim that the tale is more a hero story than an effort to fully engage slave experiences. Dagbovie concludes, “Those who teach American and African American history must be aware of how the US motion picture industry interprets the past because . . . many of their students will shape what they think they know about the past based upon these portrayals” (p. 113). Fictive interpretations of the past also inform the work of black comedians. In chapter 4, Dagbovie discusses black humor and the ways in which African American “jokesters” use humor as both a coping mechanism and a vehicle for social commentary (p. xiii). He credits Paul Mooney for routinely incorporating moments “when blacks overcame unimaginable forms of oppression” to both entertain and educate his viewers (p. 121). This commitment to telling “‘truth in jest’” is the approach taken by Mooney’s successors, namely, Dave Chappelle. Chappelle’s parodies of slavery and the civil rights movement afforded him critical acclaim. The chapter also discusses the work of Martin Lawrence, Chris Rock, Kevin Hart, and others who use humor as a tool for analyzing black experiences. In chapter 5, Dagbovie explores how past wrongdoings committed against African Americans have been addressed by politicians and the United States government. The chapter contextualizes official apologies related to African American history and notes that attempts by lawmakers to offer them have been rife with contention. Although skeptics believed apologizing for slavery and racial discrimination “would have constituted an admission of guilt and could have been used as fuel for the reparations movement,” Dagbovie notes that politicians have apologized for specific acts (like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment), have granted posthumous pardons for black people unjustly punished, have advocated for legislation honoring victims...

Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gary Nash; American Indian Studies Center Fortieth Anniversary. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 1 January 2011; 35 (1): 33–37. doi: https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.35.1.gq644g6x64254319 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest Search