African American Freedom Struggle Research Articles

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams (review)

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams (review)

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle. By Shannen Dee Williams. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2022. xxiii + 394 pp. $114.95 cloth; $30.95 paper.

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle. By Shannen Dee Williams. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2022. xxiii + 394 pp. $114.95 cloth; $30.95 paper.

Searching for Black Santa: The Contested History of an American Holiday Tradition

ABSTRACT This article explores the contested history and complex politics of the Black Santa in the United States from the antebellum period to the present day. For white journalists and entertainers during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the blackface Santa reinforced white dominance and the supposed inferiority of Black people. From the 1910s into the 1950s, Black educators and civic reformers saw the ‘Negro Santa Claus’ as a way of elevating Black self-esteem and countering racist versions of the character. For some activists and business leaders, the ‘Civil Rights Santa’ that emerged in parallel with the postwar African American freedom struggle could promote ‘good interracial feelings in the community’, and for others he belonged on the frontlines of the battle for racial equality. The Black Power Santa or ‘Soul Santa’ who came in his wake served as a symbol of Black cultural pride and economic self-determination. Finally, the modern Black Santa works to reconcile the more confrontational politics of earlier iterations with a celebration of American multiracialism and corporate responsibility. Across time and space, these different versions of the Black Santa embody competing and, at times, contradictory racial ideologies and representational politics, providing an important window into the relationship between civil rights, cultural politics, and consumer capitalism in the modern United States.

Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle: A Freedom Gaze

Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle: A Freedom Gaze

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams (review)

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams (review)

In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World ed. by Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene, and; Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America by Elena K. Abbott

Reviewed by: In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World ed. by Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene, and; Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America by Elena K. Abbott Stephanie J. Richmond (bio) In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Edited by Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene. ( Athens: University of George Press, 2021. Pp. 326. Cloth, $114.95; paper, $39.95.) Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America. By Elena K. Abbott. ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 304. Cloth, $89.99; paper, $29.99.) In the last decade, scholars have well documented the international history of the African American freedom struggle. Historians have chronicled the journeys of Black freedom fighters around the Atlantic world and explored how their connections shaped their activism. In two recently published books, the authors expand our understanding of how African American activists positioned themselves and the spaces they chose to inhabit in the context of their work for freedom and equality. Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene's collection of essays, In Search of Liberty, brings together scholars to weave a portrait of a vibrant and geographically diverse Black Atlantic. Organized geographically, the volume succeeds in recentering the transnational experience of Africans and African Americans as key to their freedom struggles. Elena K. Abbott, in her book Beacons of Liberty, examines one particular thread [End Page 112] of the international freedom struggle: the quest for free soil. In tracing the debates over and meanings of territories and colonies founded without slavery, Abbott brings the debate over free soil out of the American Midwest and into the larger conversation about freedom and slavery in the Atlantic. Both books fill important gaps in the historiography of the freedom struggle. In Search of Liberty is a collection of eleven essays that center internationalism in African American activism and intellectualism. Each section has particular strengths. The three essays on North America take us to the fringes of English-speaking North America, from Nova Scotia to Texas and Mexico. In particular, Thomas Mareite's essay on freedom seekers in Mexico is accessible and explains an often overlooked route on the Underground Railroad. Moving across the Atlantic to Africa, the essays in the next section spend a significant amount of time in Liberia and Sierra Leone, but Marcus Bruce's essay on missions in the Congo Free State brings a much-needed, new look at freedom struggles in post-slave-trade West Africa. The section on the Caribbean also stays close to some well-trodden ground with colonization schemes and the impact of Frederick Douglass and Haitian independence, but the three essays are solid contributions and highlight that the Caribbean was indeed international in context and in its position in African American thought. The final section, on Europe, is the one that does not hold up to the standards of the previous contributions. In particular, Pia Wiegmink's essay on African American women in Europe ignores a substantial body of scholarship on Black women's international travels. Angela F. Murphy's essay on abolitionists in Ireland is stronger but far too brief and focuses mainly on Frederick Douglass. Together, the eleven essays in the volume reveal the importance of international movement to the development of African American freedom philosophies. Elena K. Abbott's Beacons of Liberty examines the impact of free-soil havens outside the United States on the American antislavery movement. By examining the ways in which antislavery and Black newspapers reported on communities of self-emancipated and free people of African descent in Canada, the Caribbean, and West Africa, Abbott challenges the current historiography of both the Underground Railroad and abolitionism to look critically at the ways in which abolitionists and Black freedom seekers used international free soil to fight slavery in the United States. Studies of Black emigration from the United States have, to date, mainly focused on emigration to Africa or Europe. Abbott reminds us that the vast majority of African American emigrants settled just outside the United States' borders...

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams

Reviewed by: Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams Margaret Susan Thompson Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle. By Shannen Dee Williams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 424 pp. $29.95. Subversive Habits is the first book-length account of Black Catholic sisters in the United States. Based upon extensive research in relevant archives and numerous interviews with Black sisters (and former sisters) themselves, it fills an important gap in Catholic, Black, and women's history. Shannen Dee Williams's book aims at telling at least three interconnected but distinct stories: that of Black women in U.S. religious life, the experiences of and responses to racism that these sisters experienced, and their activism inside and outside the church. As the author puts it in her conclusion, her overarching objective is to demonstrate why "scholars must center the experiences of Black women and girls in the history of U.S. Catholicism, reconsider narratives that foreground white Catholics in struggles for racial, educational, and gender justice, and push back against characterizations of African American Catholics as politically complacent or conservative" (264). As she puts it in her final sentence, "It is my hope that this book, in offering a more honest accounting of the U.S. Catholic experience and the central place of Black sisters within it, can provide another pathway forward" (269). The result is a compelling and generally persuasive read. No one finishing Subversive Habits can be anything other than convinced of the racism that Black women have faced in the more than two centuries of women's religious life in the United States. Whether drawing upon archival sources or on her many oral history interviews, Williams [End Page 75] conveys both the frustrations and the real pain that Black women repeatedly faced—in communities comprised mainly of European Americans and even in African American congregations—as they attempted to live out their vocations. The suffering of those who were rejected as they tried to pursue vowed commitment, as well as those who experienced blatant racism both from clerics and from women religious themselves (including those who presumably were their "sisters"), is undeniable. The author makes a compelling case that Black Catholics, including Black sisters, have often been portrayed as objects rather than subjects, even of their own stories. Among the important and traditionally overlooked subjects she explores are the history of the National Black Sisters Conference, the consequences of desegregation for Black Catholic institutions (including Black sisters' congregations and the schools they conducted), and both the tensions and collaboration between Black clergy and women religious. The most original contributions Williams makes are in her coverage of the period from World War II (to the present), when her focus is simultaneously on women in predominantly Black communities and on those who attempted, with decidedly mixed success, to enter and remain in "white" ones. Here, she draws extensively on 67 interviews, mostly of Black women she interviewed either in person, by email, or over the telephone. Since many of the individuals are reflecting upon experiences—undeniably powerful and often searing—that occurred as much as a half century or more in the past, it would have been helpful had Williams given at least some methodological explanation as to how she dealt with the effect of the passage of time on these memories. [Two scholarly journals would have been helpful in this regard, History and Memory, and the Oral History Review, but both seem absent from the bibliography.] More troubling are instances where the principal sources cited for some generalizations are individual interviews. See, for example, the argument that white women, including sisters, were using the civil rights movement primarily as means of "gaining credibility and fame in order to launch a national campaign for (white) women's rights and ordination." [p. 190; also 249] While this may have been the case for some, the evidence is not sufficient to make a persuasively comprehensive claim. Perhaps a more nuanced argument ultimately would have been more effective. There are a few glitches in the narrative that may be frustrating to some. The name of Cardinal Joseph...

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams (review)

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams (review)

Castro at the Hotel Theresa

Castro at the Hotel Theresa

The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights by Thomas C. Holt

Reviewed by: The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights by Thomas C. Holt Raymond Arsenault The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights. By Thomas C. Holt. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 151. $18.95, ISBN 978-0-19-752579-1.) An abbreviated format poses a daunting challenge to any author, especially when the subject at hand is as complex and important as the American civil rights movement. Limited to approximately 120 pages of text, Thomas C. Holt had no choice but to avoid literary flourishes and potentially interesting digressions in his effort to produce a book that covers the major topics related to the history of the movement. With this restriction in mind, he set out to write a book that could transcend its brevity by keeping its "eyes on the prize," in the words of a popular movement anthem. The prize, in his view, is to capture the spirit and essence of a grassroots movement that depended heavily on the contributions and sacrifices of the mass of activists commonly known as "foot soldiers" (p. 19). Holt hopes to dispel a common misunderstanding of the civil rights struggle: the belief that the momentum and success of the movement were primarily a function of charismatic leadership and careful management from above. "Freedom," he writes in the final paragraph of the book, "is a prize won not in a single campaign, but in a long struggle waged by a determined and committed people. And, ultimately, it is not exceptional leaders but ordinary people themselves, conscious of the historical possibilities of their moment and acting collectively, who have the capacity to win that fight and change their world" (p. 120). While Holt does not deny the importance of organizational leadership, he is determined to challenge its centrality. This perspective allows him to treat leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and Stokely Carmichael as flesh and blood figures without turning them into mythic heroes. It also encourages greater appreciation for the critical role that women played in advancing the struggle, and a nuanced and balanced assessment of the relationships between local and national movements and the relative importance and connection between legal battles in the courts and the nonviolent direct-action struggle in the streets. The result is a highly sophisticated account that does full justice to both the strengths and the weaknesses of the movement. The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights is truth-telling history that studiously avoids the pitfalls of a comforting, celebratory narrative. Holt begins fittingly with a highly personal, prologue-like introduction that focuses on his grandmother Carrie Lee Fitzgerald, a Black Virginian who [End Page 423] refused to move to the back of a segregated bus in 1944. This simple act of resistance and courage, much like Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat eleven years later, introduces the intimidating world of Jim Crow that movement activists confronted in the years to come. The six chapters that follow offer an effective mix of chronological and thematic analysis, emphasizing change over time and the geographic diversity of discrimination and civil rights activism. One chapter titled "Before Montgomery" sets the stage for two chapters dealing with "Communities Organizing for Change," one subtitled "New South Cities," and the other subtitled "The New 'Old South,'" and a chapter focusing on "Organizing in the 'American Congo': Mississippi's Freedom Summer and Its Aftermath." The final two chapters address "Freedom Movements in the North" and "Legacies: 'Freedom Is a Constant Struggle.'" Despite their brevity, the six chapters offer a wealth of information and interpretive insight on the nature of the post–World War II African American freedom struggle. Holt's command of the secondary literature is sure-handed and reliable, and his conclusions about the complexities of racial discrimination and resistance bear the mark of a veteran scholar at the top of his game. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more valuable or thought-provoking introduction to the history of a movement that changed all of our lives. Raymond Arsenault University of South Florida Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Her Majesty's African-American Allies

It is well-established that African-Americans have sought allies abroad as a way to weaken opposition at home. Often, scholars have tackled this important topic as it manifested during the Cold War.1 Azza Salama Layton, International Politics and Civil Rights Policies in the United States, 1941–1960 (New York, 2000); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Gerald Horne, Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (London, 2016). R.J.M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1983); Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, NY, 2012); Gerald Horne, Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation (New York, 2012). Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York, 2012); Gerald Horne, Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle (Urbana, IL, 2013).

Beauty and Power: Beauticians, the Highlander Folk School, and Women’s Professional Networks in the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract In January 1961, fifty-two African American beauticians gathered at the Highlander Folk School, a tiny bastion of racial integration perched in the mountains of Tennessee. They had come to discuss their role in the struggle against American racism. While historians have long acknowledged the importance of gendered networks and women’s organizing within the African American freedom struggle, the history of the beauticians who gathered at Highlander demonstrates the importance of professional networks as a bridge between different local struggles. In their skill at building networks, and their attention to the patient labor required of such building, beauticians were emblematic of the organizing prowess demonstrated by women throughout the civil rights movement. But unlike most African American women, beauticians had the economic independence and social prominence to gain positions of power usually reserved for men. The intersection of their class status and their gendered identity magnified the liminal status of beauticians—and gave that status special power. As they debated their role in the movement, the beauticians who gathered at Highlander struggled to navigate between autonomy and connection, and between participatory democracy and institutional hierarchy. Their struggles reveal the inevitable tension that marked social networks within a movement that challenged not only the forces of white supremacy, but also the inequalities of status and economic power that transcended the color line.

Giving Postblackness the Silent Treatment

Review Article| June 01 2021 Giving Postblackness the Silent Treatment Prefiguring Postblackness: Cultural Memory, Drama, and the African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s. By Davis, Carol Bunch. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi. 2015. x, 210 pp. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $30.00; e-book available.Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics. By Crawford, Margo Natalie. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2017. xi, 264 pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $28.00; e-book, $19.95.Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s. By Fenderson, Jonathan. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2019. xiv, 255 pp. Cloth, $99.00; paper, $24.95; e-book, $14.95.Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture. By Gates, Racquel J.Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. 2018. 248 pp. Cloth, $99.95; paper, $25.95; e-book available. K. Merinda Simmons K. Merinda Simmons K. Merinda Simmons is professor of religious studies at the University of Alabama. Her books include Race and New Modernisms (coauthored with James A. Crank, 2019), The Trouble with Post-Blackness (coedited with Houston A. Baker, Jr., 2015), Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora (2014), and Race and Displacement (coedited with Maha Marouan, 2013). She is working on a monograph tentatively entitled “Sourcing Slave Religion: Theorizing Experience in the Archive.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2021) 93 (2): 307–327. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9003610 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation K. Merinda Simmons; Giving Postblackness the Silent Treatment. American Literature 1 June 2021; 93 (2): 307–327. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9003610 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search Janelle Monáe has demonstrated herself to be a lot of things. The talented actress, queer icon, and social activist has also brought Afrofuturism to popular music by way of android alter ego Cindi Mayweather, who Monáe has suggested represents societal fear and resonance with otherness. Her single from The Electric Lady, “Q.U.E.E.N.” (2013), with Erykah Badu, bears an acronym for structurally marginalized communities: “queer,” “untouchables,” “emigrants,” “excommunicated,” “negroid”—all “others” represented by the android trope. The song’s video begins with an announcer on a screen at the Living Museum (where black1 figures are frozen in active poses) suggesting, “It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel” (Monáe 2013). Sitting at a desk at the center of these rebels is Monáe, who reanimates along with the rest of the exhibited bodies as she starts singing. As time travelers, they... Copyright © 2021 by Duke University Press2021 Issue Section: Review Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

The mapping behind the movement: On recovering the critical cartographies of the African American Freedom Struggle

Responding to recent work in critical cartographic studies and Black Geographies, the purpose of this paper is to offer a conceptual framework and a set of evocative cartographic engagements that can inform geography as it recovers the seldom discussed history of counter-mapping within the African American Freedom Struggle. Black resistant cartographies stretch what constitutes a map, the political work performed by maps, and the practices, spaces, and political-affective dimensions of mapping. We offer an extended illustration of the conventional and unconventional mapping behind USA anti-lynching campaigns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, highlighting the knowledge production practices of the NAACP and the Tuskegee Institute’s Monroe Work, and the embodied counter-mapping of journalist/activist Ida B. Wells. Recognizing that civil rights struggles are long, always unfolding, and relationally tied over time and space, we link this look from the past to contemporary, ongoing resistant cartographical practices as scholars/activists continue to challenge racialized violence and advance transitional justice, including the noted memory-work of the Equal Justice Initiative. An understanding of African American traditions of counter-mapping is about more than simply inserting the Black experience into our dominant ideas about cartography or even resistant mapping. Black geographies has much to teach cartography and geographers about what people of color engaged in antiracist struggles define as geographic knowledge and mapping practices on their own terms—hopefully provoking a broader and more inclusive definition of the discipline itself.

God[’s] hung from a tree

As Black people struggled for freedom from oppression in the United States, toward the end of the modern era of the African American freedom struggle, a reflexive moment was taken to assess Christianity and its meaning for those whom Howard Thurman referred to as the “disinherited.” This article attempts to take up the pattern of reflective thinking, which began with Howard Thurman, James Cone, and William R. Jones, extending the thought forward to its natural conclusions. In doing so, the author intimates that the concepts that lead to racism and racial aggression are bound within the signs, symbols, and frameworks of white American Christianity, which has become a secular religion or secular way to order society. These signs, symbols, and frameworks continue to do the work of setting the ground for each subsequent generation to demonstrate a similar racial attitude as the preceding one. They also set the groundwork for Black reflective thinkers to find necessary the development of a posture of rejection toward white American Secular Christianity and all its derivative forms.

Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys Who Grew Up to Change a Nation by Anna Mae Duane

Reviewed by: Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys Who Grew Up to Change a Nation by Anna Mae Duane Alan Singer (bio) Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys Who Grew Up to Change a Nation By Anna Mae Duane. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 241 pages, $30.00 cloth, $16.50 ebook. The subtitle of Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys Who Grew Up to Change a Nation is actually misleading. This book is much more than a joint biography documenting the decades' long and frequently contentious relationship between James McCune Smith and Henry Highland Garnet. Anna Mae Duane, an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut, uses their stories to explore the history of the African Free School, the broader story of black education and social possibilities in the antebellum North, white racism, and the African American abolitionist and equal rights movements. Because of the central role Smith and Garnet played in these movements, Duane's "biography" is a valuable historical contribution to our understanding of the role race and racism played in the past and continue to play in American society. The New York African Free School was established in 1787 by prominent New Yorkers, including Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Aaron Burr (who Duane does not mention) working through the New-York Manumission Society. The book opens with a commencement address by student Margaret Odle in 1822 where Duane establishes the crucial role of the school in preparing black leaders for the struggle to end slavery in the United States. James McCune Smith (1813–65) and Henry Highland Garnet (1815–82) first met when they attended the African Free School on Mulberry Street in New York City. Smith was two years older than Garnet, who attended from 1826 until 1833, so it is unclear whether they were in the same classes. During their lives they sometimes worked together, but more frequently held conflicting positions in the African American freedom struggle. Yet, in 1865, James McCune Smith wrote the preface, "Sketch of the Life and Labors of Rev. Henry Highland Garnet," as an introduction to the published version of Garnet's "Memorial Discourse" that he delivered in the U.S. House of Representatives on February 12, 1865. In the "Sketch," Smith described Garnet as a schoolboy as "quite the opposite of the nice, good, quiet little fellow in whose mouth 'butter wouldn't melt'" (43). As Duane notes, the "men disagreed about the possibility of progress and the best way to achieve it in the United States" (6). Duane effectively roots their ideological and political conflicts in the conditions of their lives. Smith, who was born enslaved and appears to have not been emancipated until slavery ended in New York in 1827, became the first African American medical doctor. He believed advancement and eventual equality was possible in the United States, not abandoning this position even after the 1863 assault on New York's [End Page 208] Colored Orphan Asylum, where he was the head physician, during the July 1863 Draft Riot. Garnet was born enslaved in Maryland. His family escaped when he was nine, but they always risked reenslavement as fugitives. Throughout his life, Garnet championed resistance to slavery, a position Smith finally embraced after passage of the 1850 federal Fugitive Slave law. While Garnet openly challenged what he considered Frederick Douglass's unwillingness to actively confront slavery, Douglass and Smith were close friends who frequently collaborated. Smith had had positive relationships with whites while a student in Scotland and France. Garnet, who attended the Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire, when it was destroyed by a white mob, was skeptical about the African American's future in the United States, and as a Presbyterian minister he explored possible resettlement in the Caribbean and West Africa, a position that had been endorsed by the leadership of the African Free School and Abraham Lincoln, but was antithetical to Douglass and Smith. During the Civil War, Garnet, pastor of the Shiloh Presbyterian Church in what is now Soho, recruited African Americans to enlist in the Union Army. Smith, who died of heart failure...