African American Civil Research Articles

Working within the Labyrinth of Race

Over the past forty years, historians have extensively probed the causes of the historic political realignment of urban African American votes in the United States from 1928 through 1936. In particular, historians such as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Linda Materson, and Deborah Gray White have demonstrated how northern urban African American women shifted their party allegiances. Yet no one has examined whether that realignment continued among this group in the late 1930s and early 1940s. This article uses the brief yet complicated national political career of Crystal Bird Fauset (1893–1965) to demonstrate how black urban women in the United States continued their political realignment while still retaining their agency. Fauset continued the dual strategy previously established by black urban women in the United States, in which a combination of pragmatism and critical detachment enabled its proponents to support political parties without forsaking criticism of those parties’ failures. While Fauset’s personal prickliness played some part in the decline of her national political career, her continuation of the previous strategy eventually prompted her endorsement of Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey in September 1944. The primary evidence of this process can be seen in her working relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, which went from close association to total estrangement. This process began during the 1940 national campaign, as Fauset felt slighted by Roosevelt’s seeming exclusion of both herself and black urban women in general, and deepened during the spring and summer of 1944, as Roosevelt increasingly opposed Fauset’s aggressive promotion of African American women voters and civil rights.

Legitimacy and Interventionism: Northern Republicans, the “Terrible Carpetbagger,” and the Retreat from Reconstruction

Legitimacy and InterventionismNorthern Republicans, the “Terrible Carpetbagger,” and the Retreat from Reconstruction K. Stephen Prince (bio) After the Civil War, an Ohio native and Union army veteran named Albion Tourgée headed South, intending to do his part in the region’s political and social rebirth. Settling with his family in Greensboro, North Carolina, he bought a home, started a law practice, and involved himself in Republican Party politics. His fondest hope, he told his wife, was to “do good” in his adopted region. Events soon robbed Tourgée of much of his optimism. He watched a tide of white supremacist conservatism overtake North Carolina. The Ku Klux Klan killed two of his political associates and repeatedly threatened his family. The North Carolina Democratic press unmercifully pilloried him as a dangerous outsider, a corrupt interloper, and an incorrigible nuisance. Sitting in his Greensboro home at the close of Reconstruction, Albion Tourgée was left to survey the wreckage, capturing the failed promise and tragic betrayal of the period in a novel whose very title—A Fool’s Errand—spoke volumes as to its tone and its contents.1 Though copious in its criticism of murderous and anti-democratic white southerners, A Fool’s Errand reserved some of its most stinging rebukes for the North. Tourgée had little trouble understanding white southern distrust of the northern strangers that came into their midst after the war—known then, and ever since, as “carpetbaggers.”2 What he failed to comprehend was the maddening ease with which the northern public had sold out its own. “Perhaps there is no other instance in history,” Tourgée fumed, “in which the conquering power has discredited its own agents, denounced those of its own blood and faith, espoused the prejudices of its conquered foes, and poured the vials of its wrath and contempt upon the only class in the conquered territory who defended its acts, supported its policy, promoted its aim, or desired its preservation and continuance.”3 The North, Tourgée insisted, had betrayed the carpetbaggers. [End Page 538] The carpetbagger remains one of the most enduring symbols of the Reconstruction era. Technically, a carpetbagger was simply a northerner who went South in the wake of the Civil War and took part in Republican Party politics.4 For most of its lifespan, however, the term has been an epithet, denoting a lowly, immoral northern opportunist, a demagogue who preyed on the defeated South, perverted sectional peace, and rose to power by deceiving African American voters. As late as 1988, historian Richard N. Current’s classic Those Terrible Carpetbaggers could be labeled “a reinterpretation” precisely because it insisted upon the humanity of these historical villains. Current concluded that the carpetbaggers were, in reality, no better and no worse than most other Americans. The average carpetbagger was an educated, moneyed Union veteran who hoped to make his home in the South and entered politics largely as an afterthought. Some were undoubtedly corrupt, but many others were honest and deeply committed to the ideals of Reconstruction, to African American civil rights, and to the rebuilding of the South.5 If Current successfully debunked the terrible carpetbagger stereotype, the more recent work of historian Ted Tunnell has shed important light on its provenance. “Carpetbagger” was never a value-neutral term, Tunnell argues. From the first, it was an ingenious piece of political propaganda, a highly self-conscious “rhetorical weapon” that white southerners coined to discredit Radical Reconstruction and African American suffrage.6 The carpetbagger’s less-than-sterling historical reputation, Tunnell concludes, had less to do with graft and corruption than it did with the politics of white supremacy. If we accept, with Current and Tunnell, that the carpetbaggers were not actually that terrible, we are still left to account for the phenomenon that Tourgée described—the widespread, nearly universal, northern acceptance of the “terrible carpetbagger” stereotype during the latter years of Reconstruction. A study of the northern Republican repudiation of the carpetbagger promises to shed new light on the manner in which Americans conceptualized and experienced the nation’s retreat from Reconstruction. As it traces the fate of the carpetbagger in the northern Republican print media...

Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange (review)

Reviewed by: Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange John David Smith Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange. Edited by Larry A. Greene and Anke Ortlepp. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. Pp. xxi + 244. Cloth $55.00. ISBN 978-1604737844. This eclectic collection focuses on the nexus between African Americans and Germans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Editors Larry A. Greene and Anke Ortlepp underscore the rich cultural, demographic, and intellectual elements that have long connected Africans, African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Germans. Their book suggests how the linkages between black Americans and Germans “shaped the African American freedom quest and both their attempts at ethnic self-definition” (vii). Scholars identify the exchange between African Americans and Germans on several levels. The most obvious results from the presence of almost 3,000,000 black American GIs stationed in Germany in the half-century following the end of World War II. The syncretism of African Americans and Germans took and continues to take many forms—from personal and familial relationships to the merging of language, music, art, dance, and history. But even before World War II, German scholars expressed fascination with and conducted research in African American agriculture, folklore, literature, and social science, an interest that continues to manifest itself regularly in the meetings and publications of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien and the Collegium on African American Research. As Eva Boesenberg notes, African American studies comprises “an esteemed, even prominent segment of U.S.-American Studies in contemporary Germany” (227). Though German-speaking peoples played a minor role in the transatlantic slave trade, they nevertheless engaged with Africans and African Americans in British colonial and US national contexts. Greene and Ortlepp observe that “Germany . . . served as a source of both support and opposition to that historic quest of African Americans for freedom and independence in the modern age” (ix). The essays in their compilation complicate, contextualize, and add nuance to that assertion. Victor Grossman, for example, touches autobiographically on the experiences of black GIs who sought refuge or asylum in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), raising the important question of the degree of racial tolerance in the post-Nazi Germanys in comparison to the segregated American South and, later, an increasingly multiethnic and multicultural United States. Aribert Schroeder’s article on the life of Oliver Wendell Harrington, the prominent black cartoonist and journalist who took asylum in East Berlin in 1961, adds detail and context to understanding this complex expatriate community. From East Germany Harrington championed equality for black Americans and African liberation movements. Looking at an earlier age, Mischa Honeck and Jeffrey Strickland examine the interactions of German immigrants and people of African descent, also immigrants, in antebellum Cincinnati, Ohio and Charleston, South Carolina, respectively. Honeck [End Page 656] details what he terms the “unexpected alliance” between two radicals—the black educator Peter H. Clark and the German socialist editor August Willich—in challenging class and racial bias and championing abolition. Strickland examines how Charleston’s German immigrants became “southern” following the Civil War, identifying with conservative Democrats who, as W. E. B. Du Bois explained in Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935), worked to return the freed people to a metaphorical “slavery.” Leroy Hopkins charts the ambiguous German responses to the brilliant African American performer Louis W. Douglas, whose work in radio, musical reviews, and film transformed him into an iconic figure in the Weimar Republic from 1925 to 1931. In bringing “Harlemania” to Weimar, Douglas both reinforced German and white American racist caricatures of blacks and served “as an agent of conciliation between nations” (67). The rise of the Third Reich and Germany as a racist totalitarian state, Larry A. Greene explains in his essay, led African Americans to draw a parallel between the Nuremberg Laws and the de jure segregation of the Jim Crow South. America’s entry into World War II, Greene observes, “heightened the already existing contradictions between America’s democratic rhetoric and the reality of America’s segregated society,” a “contradiction that initiated the modern African American civil rights movement led by an African American press . . .” (70). In his fascinating analysis of Julius Lips, the German Africanist, one...

The Other Southern Belles: Civil War Reenactment, African American Women, and the Performance of Idealized Femininity

This essay examines African American women's participation in Civil War reenactment as performances of idealized femininity. African American Civil War reenactments enable black men and women to construct narratives of historical subjectivity through performances of masculine and feminine agency. In enacting the role of the “demure southern belle” supporting black Union soldiers, black women reenactors occupy an image associated with idealized femininity. This appropriation of southern belle iconicity destabilizes past and contemporary representations, rooted in southern mythology, relegating black women to the categories of the mammy and Jezebel, the black whore. In this endeavor, they use these performances as resistance, thereby suggesting the presence of power and subversion within traditionalism. Moreover, as the black male reenactor's occupation of the conservative image of the idealized citizen-soldier is perceived as anathema to contemporary black masculinist discourse, the ironies inherent in black women's performance of traditional femininity as feminist discourse underscore the problematics embedded within mainstream feminism, revealing the situated nature of its core assumptions.

Image and Labor in a Longer, Broader Civil Rights Movement

Image and Labor in a Longer, Broader Civil Rights Movement Kate Sampsell-Willmann (bio) Cornelius L. Bynum. A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. x + 244 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, and index. $75.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). Leigh Raiford. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 293 pp. Photos, bibliography, notes, and index. $45.00. In the last decade, scholars have reconsidered the temporal span of the African American Civil Rights Movement (CRM): taken together, which moments of heroism and conscience are to be included in the “modern” CRM? Once considered to be tightly bracketed by the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., historians have erased that arbitrary end point, correctly extending the ongoing struggle for full political citizenship into the present. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s 2004 American Historical Association presidential address, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” is the landmark publication marking the shift.1 And although her essay and the efforts of other historians since have nominally encouraged lengthening the study of the organized movement to a place earlier in time than the 1950s, few have written in that temporal direction until recently. Fewer still have considered integrating unfettered economic participation as an essential element of full citizenship into the primary civil rights thesis. By including equal opportunity to economic justice in the panoply of civil rights and citizenship privileges, the date of the movement’s birth is easily stepped backwards in time. The books discussed here give an opportunity to extend formally, by a generation, the scope of the fully modern CRM, thus including economic opportunity as essential to civic engagement. In doing so, they also examine the classification used by authors to delineate where the timeline should begin. Cornelius Bynum’s A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights seeks (beginning in its colorblind title) to reverse Randolph’s exclusion from the A-list of civil rights heroes. A. Philip Randolph is perhaps the least explored of [End Page 492] the civil rights titans and is usually dismissed as the “vanguard” or “father” of the modern CRM, someone standing outside and prior, representing more “freedom struggle” than “civil rights.” Yet, as Bynum successfully establishes, Randolph was much more than the figurehead named honorary chair of the 1963 March, the vocal Messenger editor, or the footnoted organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph was a political ideologue whose leadership is especially relevant in the present atmosphere of race, labor, and Republican Party agenda. (This is relevant especially in that Party’s attempt to redefine the notion of “civil rights” from one of King’s pursuit of access to society’s segregated spaces to one more about Glenn Beck’s individualistic rationale for avarice2). The freedom to organize peacefully, engage in collective action, and demand economic fairness is also a civil right. Why are Randolph’s contributions relegated to the prehistory of civil rights, even though one of his major triumphs preceded by only seven years Rosa Parks’ brave refusal to vacate her seat? Randolph’s invisibility might be explained by his 100 percent, unapologetic, no-holds-barred embrace of socialism; yet, he was also, to the same degree (after early flirtation with the doctrine), an anticommunist. “Socialist” is today’s easy epithet used to smear others with a stench of un-American behavior, not unlike McCarthy-era accusations of communism. Randolph remained committed to socialism as the path to economic justice for all workers throughout his life, but he saw no value in communism to help American workers. Perhaps because of his inconvenient ideological commitment, or perhaps because he initially pursued a colorblind approach to economic justice, Randolph is conspicuously absent from the modern civil rights pantheon (as is Bayard Rustin, who, despite convincing King to employ active nonviolence, was inconveniently homosexual). Bynum’s A. Philip Randolph is divided into four sections based on Randolph’s intellectual progression from his childhood, riding the circuit with his minister father; to his move to Harlem in 1911; to the era...

African American Civil Rights: Early Activism and the Niagara Movement

African American Civil Rights: Early Activism and the Niagara Movement

Taking Care of Unfinished Business and the Business of the 21st Century

This article examines the work of an imaginary Institute for Advanced Study in Civil Rights as a model of changed oriented knowledge production, preferably in a major research university in the Deep South. The work of this Institute covers the span of the finished and unfinished business and unanticipated consequences in both respects for the 1940s–1960s sociological generation of African American civil rights leaders and their non–African American allies, as well as post-1960s issues this generation was unable to see or comprehend.

The Struggle in black and brown: African American and Mexican American relations during the civil rights era

List of Illustrations 000 Introduction 000 Brian D. Behnken 1. Not Similar Enough: American and African American Civil Rights Struggles in the 1940s 000 Lisa Y. Ramos 2. The Movement in the Mirror: Civil Rights and the Causes of Black-Brown Disunity in Texas 000 Brian D. Behnken 3. Complicating the Beloved Community: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the National Farm Workers Association 000 Lauren Araiza 4. The Neighborhood Adult Participation Project: Black-Brown Strife in the War on Poverty in Los Angeles 000 Robert Bauman 5. Mexican versus Negro Approaches to the War on Poverty: Black-Brown Competition and the Office of Economic Opportunity in Texas 000 William Clayson 6. Cesar and Martin, March 68 000 Jorge Mariscal 7. Black, Brown, and Poor: Civil Rights and the Making of the Chicano Movement 000 Gordon Mantler 8. Brown-Eyed Soul: Popular Music and Cultural Politics in Los Angeles 000 Luis Alvarez and Daniel Widener 9. Raising a Neighborhood: Informal Networks between African American and American Women in South Central Los Angeles 000 Abigail Rosas 10. A New Day in Babylon: African American and American Relations at the Dawn of the Millennium 000 Matthew C. Whitaker List of Contributors 000Index 000

"In a Conventional Dither": Rodgers and Hammerstein's Camouflaged Critique of Race Relations at Mid-Century

"In a Conventional Dither":Rodgers and Hammerstein's Camouflaged Critique of Race Relations at Mid-Century Jack L. B. Gohn (bio) Standard histories of the African-American experience in America like John Hope Franklin's or Manning Marable's agree that in most respects the years 1949-51 fell in the middle of a fallow period. The wave of political and social betterment for American blacks achieved during the New Deal and World War Two had crested, culminating with the 1947 admission of Jackie Robinson to the white major leagues and Harry Truman's 1948 order integrating the Armed Forces. After that, with few exceptions, the movement had reached a "one step back" moment. The Red Scare was largely to blame. Segregationists could with remarkable success tag all integrationist aspirations as Communistic, via the syllogism that international Communism sought to destabilize the U.S., integration would differ from and hence be destabilizing to the existing state of affairs in much of the country, and hence integration was Communistic. Moreover, American Communists, who had been, by all accounts, the most principled and consistent foes of Jim Crow laws and segregation in the workplace, were in full flight, being hunted into what would prove a permanent exile from the U.S. labor movement, academia, government, and entertainment. Incidental to that purge was fratricidal infighting on the American left between Communists and anti-Communists which took a particularly heavy and distracting toll on the NAACP and Congress of Racial Equality. True, Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall were continuing their careful case-by-case assault on the legal citadel of Jim Crow, an assault that would reach its apex in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education, and Brown would change everything. But while some of the five cases consolidated in Brown had already been filed by 1951, it is significant that in four of them segregation was upheld. Fundamentally, Jim Crow laws and what might be called the Jim Crow state of mind, a sense that white privilege was a norm which could never fundamentally be overturned, continued to hold sway in 1949-51. The anti-Communist hysteria also had well-known implications in the world of entertainment. Though the infamous Hollywood "blacklist" turned out not to affect Broadway employment much, there was so much travel back and forth between the venues that the habits of circumspection the Red Scare brought to Hollywood could hardly fail to affect Broadway productions. And since, as noted, support for African-American civil rights was viewed as a sign of Communist sympathies, it would not in turn be easy to espouse those civil rights on Broadway. In short, during the three-year stretch in which Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's South Pacific (1949) and The King and I (1951) reached the Broadway stage, theatrical expressions of support for the equality of black and white were a dicey proposition, courting charges of [End Page 420] Communist sympathies. And yet in these two musicals, lyricist and librettist Hammerstein found a way to voice that support. However, in keeping with the times as well as his temperament, he did so by indirection, and also with what might be called camouflage: presenting the "destabilizing" message about race relations in a matrix that included remarkably conventional and reassuring, even retrograde, messages concerning the relations of the sexes and colonialism. The conservative American Weltanschauung was being challenged, but only a little. Both the indirection and the camouflage were bound up with the showmanship and the temperaments of Hammerstein and his collaborator Richard Rodgers. These two shows came at the fulcrum of R&H's career. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II created eleven musicals over the years 1941-1959. Five of them (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music) were indisputably great: game-changers as to the whole genre of musical theater, long-running, sources of popular hits and standards, and destined to be revived continually through the changing tastes and mores of the succeeding years. As chronicled by Jim Lovensheimer, author of the phenomenally well-researched and insightful study South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten (2010), Hammerstein was an inveterate integrationist. He had been part of...

The Making of an African American Foreign Policy Lobby: The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa

The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA) became adevice of the African American elite for influencing United States policytoward Sub-Saharan Africa between 1962 and 1967, and for intervening inAfrican affairs. Yet, its origin and identity have been largely taken forgranted. The story that is usually told is that the ANLCA, founded in 1962,was an African American organization that was the brainchild of GeorgeHouser. The implication is that the ANLCA was consciously created ab initioas an organization for African Americans by Houser. Why would Housercause to be established an African American organization to pursue thesame objectives as his American Committee on Africa? By problematizingthe origin and identity of the ANLCA, the paper draws attention to thetradition of organizational support for African causes in the United States,and the circumstances that gave form to the ANLCA. It contends that whatHouser proposed, and the African American civil rights elite joined inorganizing, was a conference on Africa, nothing more. That the ANLCAoutlasted the Arden House Conference was not the original design of eitherHouser or the African American civil rights elite or an intended outcome. Asa foreign policy lobby organization, therefore, the ANLCA was a historicalaccident. …U.S.-African relations cannot be adequately understoodunless it is examined within the context of its domesticconstituency

Discovering the African-American Civil War through Mary Chesnut

I had stopped believing that we could ever learn more about the onetime slave maid who literally rescued the Chesnut finances after the war with her shared dairy business. But thanks to this extraordinary photograph, in the published annotation of which I had the good fortune to participate, that inquiry is just beginning.

“A Mind-Opening Influence of Great Importance”: Arthur Raper at Agnes Scott College

Born in 1917, Winifred H. Winnie Kellersberger raised in the Belgian Congo, where her parents were prominent medical missionaries. Following in the path of her stepmother, in 1934 she matriculated at Agnes Scott College, an all-women's institution in Decatur, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. There she excelled in the classroom and played an active role in campus life. In particular, she a leader in the campus YWCA, serving as president her senior year. She belonged to the Mortar Board honor society and one of seven members of the Class of 1938 named to Who's Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges. (1) In 1940 Kellersberger married Lachlan C. Vass, a recently ordained Presbyterian minister, and the couple moved to the Belgian Congo, where they did missionary work for the next thirty years. Among other activities, Kellersberger edited the mission's monthly publication and authored five books in the Tshiluba language. Upon returning to the States, in 1971 she received a master's degree in Journalism and Communications from the University of Florida. In 1980, a revised version of her thesis published as The Bantu Speaking Heritage of the United States. In its dedication she wrote: To Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, the inspiration of my student days to intellectual fortitude; To Dr. James Weldon Johnson, the inspiration of my student days to spiritual fortitude; And to Dr. Arthur F. Raper, my esteemed professor of sociology at Agnes Scott College, who introduced me to Dr. Du Bois and Dr. Johnson, I dedicate this book. (2) That a graduate of a southern white women's college from this period would dedicate a book to two famous African American civil rights leaders highly unusual, to put it mildly. And Winifred Kellersberger Vass's trajectory extraordinary in many ways. Yet she hardly alone among her Agnes Scott classmates in her admiration for her professor Arthur Raper, one of the South's leading liberals who also part-time at the college from 1932 to 1939. Eliza King Paschall, whom the Class of 1938 selected to be its life president, later recalled that Raper was one of those persons who leaves his mark on the lives of every person he touches. Similarly, Elsie West Duval, the class testator, remembered that Raper taught me for the first time to THINK for myself. Indeed, as a measure of the high regard in which he held, the Class of 1938 dedicated the college yearbook to Raper, an unusual tribute to a part-time instructor, let alone an outspoken liberal. (3) Raper's work as research secretary for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and as a founding member of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, his classic works on lynching and the plantation South, and his involvement with the New Deal have all been amply chronicled in the historical literature. However, in their exploration of southern liberalism, the Depression and New Deal, and the origins of the modern Civil Rights Movement, scholars have all but neglected Raper's time at Agnes Scott. Yet on fully a third of his hundreds of speaking appearances across the region, Raper identified as being from Agnes Scott rather than the Interracial Commission. An examination of Raper's sometimescontroversial tenure at Agnes Scott reveals an important though neglected dimension of his life, an experience he himself later referred to as perhaps his finest hour. It expands our treatment of southern liberals beyond their organizational activities to their experiences as teachers and students. It also complicates and challenges much of what we know about southern white women's colleges during the ferment of the 1930s. (4) Originating as the Decatur Female Seminary in 1889, the Presbyterian-affiliated school chartered as Agnes Scott College in 1906, the first accredited women's college in the state. By the early 1920s, the school offered a full academic curriculum, the professional credentials of the faculty had been upgraded, and alumnae were attending some of the nation's most prestigious graduate programs. …

Native Americans in Cold War Public Diplomacy: Indian Politics, American History, and the US Information Agency

This essay examines the depiction of Native Americans by the US Information Agency (USIA), the bureau charged with explaining American politics to the international public during the Cold War. In the 1950s and 1960s, the USIA broadcast the message that Americans had begun to acknowledge their nation's history of conquest and were working to redress old wrongs through an activist government. That message echoed the agency's depiction of the African American Civil Rights Movement and allowed the USIA to recognize Indian resistance to assimilation. It offered little room for tribal nationhood, however, during these early years of the modern American Indian political revival.

My Name Is Not Easy (review)

Reviewed by: My Name Is Not Easy Elizabeth Bush Edwardson, Debby Dahl . My Name Is Not Easy. Cavendish, 2011. [248p]. Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-7614-5980-4 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-7614-6091-6 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-9. Luke Aaluk and his younger brothers Bunna and Isaac are sent by their mother to Sacred Heart, a Catholic boarding school to the south of their Alaskan community, where Eskimo and Indian students are enculturated in white customs and values. Isaac, who is technically too young to be enrolled, is promptly sent off into foster care without the consent, or even notification, of their mother. Luke and Bunna make an attempt at escape, but they are tracked down by one of the more open-minded priests and convinced they should give the school another chance. The boys' conflict with the white Catholic authorities is exacerbated by tensions within the school, pitting Indians against Eskimos and the few marginalized white children also in attendance. Moreover, Cold War pressures involve many of the Inupiaq students in a government testing program in which they ingest radioactive iodine to help researchers investigate how they withstand extreme cold. Eventually leaders of the school factions realize that bonding rather than fighting is in their best interest, and they take a bold stand against the school administration by tracking down Isaac and exposing the system of abducting indigenous children to be placed within white families. Edwardson, author of Blessing's Bead (BCCB 2/10), returns to the complex world of Alaskan culture and history here with this dramatic story. Readers who associate draconian Indian schools with an earlier period may be surprised to see the system continuing here well into the 1960s. Middle-schoolers who are studying the African-American civil rights movement playing out in the Lower 48 will find compelling comparisons and contrasts in the struggles of Luke and his classmates to advance into the wider world while retaining their cultural identity. [End Page 143] Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Mrs. Durham's Discipline: Race, Nation, and American Literary History's Spots

In Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots, Mrs. John Durham, partner in her clergyman husband's calling to rescue the South from the scourges of Republican corruption and “Negro supremacy” (194), offers the following causal account of the region's plight: “A little Yankee woman wrote a crude book. The single act of that woman's will caused the war, killed a million men, desolated and ruined the South, and changed the history of the world” (262). Politics aside, one might assume—a century since Dixon wrote, and several decades since literary critics began to devote sustained attention to the contested categories and interrelations of historiography, authorial agency, and social change—that, for American literary historians, Mrs. Durham's interpretive reductiveness on all of these counts would be obvious. One would be wrong. Michael Gilmore cites Mrs. Durham's judgment in the concluding pages of The War on Words: Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature (2010), and follows the quotation with this comment: “In 1902, no realist, and quite possibly no northern author, would have endorsed such extravagant claims for the aesthetic (or the unaesthetic, according to the preacher's wife); but the South, blaming the war on abolitionism and still smarting from the Reconstruction amendments, had never forgotten what writing could accomplish” (272). Gilmore's argument is that “the South,” here, has it right. Mrs. Durham, he explains, “draws our notice to the principal factor” in bringing about the Civil War and African-American civil rights: “[T]he power of literature” (272). Indeed, he suggests, had postwar northern authors not forgotten this liberatory power—had they not been so “undone by a loss of faith in the verbal's efficacy” that they abandoned the “prophetic tradition in support of racial justice” that animated and unified the work of their American Renaissance predecessors (267)—the progressive change that Mrs. Durham excoriates might have been more robust and enduring.

Quest for equality: the failed promise of black-brown solidarity

As the United States championed principles of freedom and equality during World War II, it denied fundamental rights to many non-white citizens. In the wake of President Franklin Roosevelt's 'Good Neighbor' policy with Latin America, African American and Mexican American civil rights leaders sought ways to make that policy of respect and mutual obligations apply at home as well as abroad. They argued that a whites-only democracy not only denied constitutional protection to every citizen but also threatened the war effort and FDR's aims. Neil Foley examines the complex interplay among regional, national, and international politics that plagued the efforts of Mexican Americans and African Americans to find common ground in ending employment discrimination in the defense industries and school segregation in the war years and beyond. Underlying differences in organizational strength, political affiliation, class position, and level of assimilation complicated efforts by Mexican and black Americans to forge strategic alliances in their fight for economic and educational equality. The prospect of interracial cooperation foundered as Mexican American civil rights leaders saw little to gain and much to lose in joining hands with African Americans. Over a half century later, African American and Latino civil rights organizations continue to seek solutions to relevant issues, including the persistence of de facto segregation in our public schools and the widening gap in wealth and income in America. Yet they continue to grapple with the difficulty of forging solidarity across lines of cultural, class, and racial-ethnic difference, a struggle that remains central to contemporary American life.

Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian-American Poetry Since 1965

Reviewed by: Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian-American Poetry Since 1965 Ashanti L. White (bio) Yu, Timothy . Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian-American Poetry Since 1965. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. "Race and the avant-garde have been linked since the dawn of the twentieth century" commences Timothy Yu's ingenious Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian-American Poetry since 1965 (1). In his exhaustive study, Yu delineates the political and social upheaval that defined the 1960s American climate to probe two social groups, Asian Americans and Experimentalists, that emerged from the turmoil to create synchronous aesthetic movements that redefined the avant-garde and American poetry. Since their inception four decades ago, both groups have altered and reformalized their sui generis [End Page 210] methods while emending who warrants inclusion into their poetic schools. Specifically, Yu demonstrates the modus in which Asian American poets and Experimentalists egressed as indeterminate poetic groups that adhered to avant-gardist standards by elucidating their social demarcation. One of the most turbulent debates of the 1960s was the anti-Vietnam War movement, which served as a major catalyst in the Language poetry revolution. Chapter 1 of Yu's study examines Allen Ginsberg, an original pioneer of the avant-garde style, and his poem "Howl," which politicized the usually aesthetic genre. By focusing principally on a point in history and crafting the work from a nonconformist perspective, "Howl" defies traditional poetics by suggesting that vision cannot truly embody universalities. Yu's inspection of "Howl" reveals that the poem's platform relies on the cognizance of the protesters who evolved as social "outsiders" who challenged the supererogatory conflict. The idiosyncrasies of discontent are imparted mainly in Ginsberg's phraseology. In the spirit of Language poetry, Ginsberg applies fractured language and imagery to actively involve the "conscious" reader "who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge that actually happened and walked / away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown / soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even on free beer" (30). Yu informs the reader that although Ginsberg subsumes individualist constructions, he recognizes that inspiration is derived from the situation of the group in which one is a member. Ginsberg's apperception, according to this study, establishes the foundation for the Experimental poetry movement. Yu continues Race and the Avant-Garde by investigating the work of a divergent Language innovator, Ron Silliman, who was sonorously influenced by Allen Ginsberg's style of literary recording. Conversely, Silliman's employment of formalistic modus operandi transformed the Language intendment from person in relation to his outside influences, as was the case with Ginsberg, to the collective experiences as the subject of the poetics. Yu exposes that this catalyst forced Silliman into a "much greater awareness of the location and the limits of his own perspective" (38). But the avant-garde is a movement outside of the mainstream, so the repositioning of Language poetry brought a characterization of the social grouping of its artists as well as the consciousness of other social dimensions within the environment in which the poetry originated. Whereas Ginsberg's focus lay in the anti-Vietnam movement, social revolutions, including the Women's Rights Movements and the African American Civil Rights Movements, were concurrently stirring. Yu divulges that Silliman exploited those happening to differentiate his writing. His embrace and utilization of the distinctiveness of "others" to influence his poetry served as a means of denoting Language poets just as there existed women and gay/lesbian poets. In the opening chapter of Race and the Avant-Garde, Yu asserts that race and the avant-garde are incontrovertibly linked, yet Language poets, who subscribed to the aesthetic and social requirements of the avant-garde, appeared racially and sexually exclusive. Silliman argues that the "social codes" that barred women, homosexual, and ethnic minority writers also dictated Language poets as they aesthetically diverged from other social groups. Yu comments: "This formulation . . . can be and has been interpreted in at least two ways: as an honest, descriptive assessment of the historical and personal forces that seem to have given rise to Language writing . . . or as an exclusionary, prescriptive formula that suggests women and minorities do not or cannot engage...

PAN-AFRICAN CONNECTIONS, TRANSNATIONAL EDUCATION, COLLECTIVE CULTURAL CAPITAL, AND OPPORTUNITIES INDUSTRIALIZATION CENTERS INTERNATIONAL

Previous articleNext article No AccessPAN-AFRICAN CONNECTIONS, TRANSNATIONAL EDUCATION, COLLECTIVE CULTURAL CAPITAL, AND OPPORTUNITIES INDUSTRIALIZATION CENTERS INTERNATIONALV. 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 96, Number 1Winter 2011 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.96.1.0044 Views: 41Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 2011 ASALHPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Dionne Danns and Michelle A. Purdy Introduction: Historical Perspectives on African American Education, Civil Rights, and Black Power, The Journal of African American History 100, no.44 (Nov 2017): 573–585.https://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.100.4.0573

Role of W.E.B Du Bois in the Afro-American Cultural Politics and the Harlem Renaissance

The paper illustrates the cultural politics involving the African-American community that witnessed movements during various stages starting from the late 18th century and culminating in the 20th century. There was an amalgamation of various social, cultural and to some extent political initiatives led by various African-American intellectuals and civil activists for the elevation and emancipation of the Afro-American community and for the reclamation of the civil rights and equality for blacks in the American society. One of these intellectuals, Du Bois played an important role in furthering the cause of African-African community and giving them their rightful place in the highly divided country bruised by the Civil War.The African-American Liberation Movement focused on assimilation of blacks into the urban American society after a ghettoization of areas in the North following mass migrations of African-Americans from the South. Political activism by Du Bois and other persons such as Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington and others sought recognition of African roots in their mixed African-American heritage and fostering of realization of pride in their roots, rich and distinctive cultural heritage and also uniting them while remaining moderate. At the same time he fought against social ills such as racial discrimination and segregation and being himself a supporter of higher education for black community, he wrote extensively on a variety of themes ranging from family to religion and so forth. Various organizations such as National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People (NAACP) canalized the ideological discourses.The Harlem Renaissance characterized change and enhancement of music as well as political and ideological writing. These events are of paramount importance while looking at the shaping of African-American cultural identity.

Long is the way and hard: one hundred years of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

This groundbreaking collection looks at the NAACP at all levels. Celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary in February 2009, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been the leading and best-known African American civil rights organization in the United States. It has played a major, and at times decisive, role in most of the important developments in the twentieth century civil rights struggle. Drawing on original and previously unpublished scholarship from leading researchers in the United States, Britain, and Europe, this important collection of sixteen original essays offers new and invaluable insights into the work and achievements of the association. The first part of the book offers challenging reappraisals of two of the NAACP's best-known national spokespersons, Walter White and Roy Wilkins. Other essays analyze the association's cultural initiatives and the key role played by its public-relations campaigns in the mid 1950s to counter segregationist propaganda and win over the hearts and minds of American public opinion in the wake of the NAACP's landmark legal victory in Brown v. Board of Education. Others provide thought-provoking accounts of the association's complex and difficult relationship with Martin Luther King, the post-World War II Civil Rights movement, and Black Power radicals of the 1960s. The second part of the collection focuses on the work of the NAACP at state, city, and local levels, examining its grassroots organization throughout the nation from Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit in the North, to California in the West, as well as states across the South including Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. Providing detailed and fascinating information on hitherto little explored aspects of the association's work, these studies complement the previous essays by demonstrating the impact national initiatives had on local activists and analyzing the often-strained relations between the NAACP national office in New York and its regional branches.