African American History Research Articles

«Точка сборки»: «Хижина дяди Тома» и американская культурная модель черной расы

Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (1852) being the most powerful statement on the racial issue in the 19th century American literature, succeeded to incorporate and rethink everything that the national tradition had in stock on the problem of slavery and race relations. The Black racial / cultural identity model that was taking shape in the 18th century Anglo-American literature, later was being enriched and transformed throughout American (and African-American) literary history. Uncle Tom's Cabin became another crucial text (the next one after Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia) that provided the emerging Black cultural / racial identity model with a new quality: it became universal, nationally recognized — and at the same time a point of controversy provoking endless debates and open for dynamic change and transformations, as was the case with anti-Tom literature and the ambivalent reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in African American literary tradition. The analysis of The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854) by Caroline Lee Hentz, a typical example of anti-Tom novels, gives an idea of the pro-slavery response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The final part of the paper is a survey of the main stages in African American response since the 1853 argument between Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass that became a matrix for the further polemic, and up to Henry Louis Gates’s subversive “double-voiced” interpretation of the novel which is in full agreement with the tendency to revise the role of white Abolitionists in the antislavery movement and African American history, typical for African American studies in the 1990s–2000s.

Andrew Fearnley, and Daniel Matlin, Race Capital? Harlem as Setting and Symbol. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. 312. $65.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsAndrew Fearnley, and Daniel Matlin, Race Capital? Harlem as Setting and Symbol. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. 312. $65.00 (cloth).Alyssa LopezAlyssa LopezProvidence College (USA) Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 107, Number 1Winter 2022 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/717510 Views: 20Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Neo-slave Narrative and Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada

The Neo-slave Narrative and Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada W. Lawrence Hogue (bio) Between the 1830s and the 1860s, African Americans published many slave narratives, including those of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Henry Bibb (1849). But perhaps the most influential slave narrative during this period was that of a white woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852. Even as Black writers rediscovered their African and African American cultural and historical past during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, there were only two narratives or novels about slavery, Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (1936) and Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon (1931).1 Nor were any narratives/novels about slavery written by African Americans in the 1940s or the 1950s. But the absence of texts about slavery by African Americans does not mean the absence of the image of slavery and the enslaved African American before the American public. Within the institutions of the ideological state apparatus, such as the media and education, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin's influential and widespread construction of slavery was taught in high schools and colleges and was reproduced on television and in Holly-wood. There were many film adaptations of Stowe's novel, including nine from the silent era—especially Edwin S. Porter's 1903 twelve-minute film adaptation, in which Uncle Tom is "a childlike, unthinking, and happy slave" (hooks 2013, 99). Later there were Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone with the Wind (1939), Santa Fe Trail (1940), Song of the South (1946), and The Foxes of Harrow (1947)—all dealing with the Civil War, slavery, and Reconstruction. The mainstream literary establishment, educational institutions, and Hollywood successfully established Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and related films as the generalized truth about slavery. In the 1960s, things begin to change for African American writers and the representation of slavery. In 1962, William Melvin Kelley in A Different Drummer revisited and reconfigured the enslaved African, giving him subjectivity and agency. In 1966, Margaret Walker published Jubilee, which is about her great-grandmother, who was a slave. In 1971, Ernest Gaines published The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which is about a one-hundred-year-old Black woman who was born in slavery and had [End Page 253] lived to see the beginnings of the civil rights movement. With these texts, along with John O'Killen's Slaves (1969), Gayle Jones's Corregidora (1975), Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976), Alex Haley's Roots (1976), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990), Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991), J. California Cooper's In Search of Sale Factory (1994), Lorene Carey's The Price of the Child (1995), Lalita Tademy's Cane River (2000), Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2004), Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes (2007), Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016), and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer (2019), slavery returned to the center of African American literature. Why were African American writers again writing slave narratives or novels about slavery? Was it the stories about slavery that their grandparents had passed down, as in the case of Walker's Jubilee? Was the new emphasis on slavery a result of the 1960s, which created a generation of African Americans who had "assessed and absorbed their history, and, in that tremendous action, ha[d] freed themselves of it and w[ould] never be victims again" (Baldwin 1997, 20), or who, in critically examining their history, had psychologically broken away and freed themselves from white hegemonic narratives about slavery (embodied in Stowe) and, therefore, could revisit the issue of slavery from a different space, giving them an understanding of their own power and agency? Seemingly, the 1960s produced a generation of African American historians, scholars and writers who revisited, dusted off, interrogated, and critically studied and reclaimed African and African American history, cultural traditions, and belief systems that had been denigrated, appropriated, omitted, and/or excluded by Western reason. But unlike normative American society, this generation viewed this history and these...

Blake Hill-Saya, Aaron McDuffie Moore: An African American Physician, Educator, and Founder of Durham’s Black Wall Street. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 258. $26.95 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsBlake Hill-Saya, Aaron McDuffie Moore: An African American Physician, Educator, and Founder of Durham’s Black Wall Street. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 258. $26.95 (cloth).Thomas J. Ward Jr.Thomas J. Ward Jr.Farmingdale State College–SUNY (USA) Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 107, Number 1Winter 2022 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/717490 Views: 46Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Gabriel’s plot of 1800: the story of the failed uprising

This article analyzes one of the most significant, yet understudied events in African-American history. The Virginia Conspiracy or the Gabriel Conspiracy of 1800 is considered the most famous case of organizing a mass armed uprising of slaves in the United States. Inspired by the ideas and examples of the American, Great French and Haitian revolutions, black slaves tried not just to raise an uprising and achieve liberation, but actually challenged the slave-owning orders of the entire white South. The scale and geography of the conspiracy leave no doubt that it originally implied a mass armed demonstration, which was to begin simultaneously in several cities of Virginia and spread to neighboring states. The purpose of this study is to analyze and restore the chronicle of the main events related to the Virginia Conspiracy of 1800. The materials of the trial and some periodicals act as a source base, while the author also relies on the research of leading American experts on this topic. The main objectives of the study include: to consider the background of the conspiracy and some issues of Gabriel’s early biography and to study the process of preparing a speech and the immediate implementation of the plan. The article also analyzes the consequences of the events of 1800 for the legislation of Virginia and the entire white South. The main methods are historical-descriptive and comparative-historical, allowing to draw the necessary parallels with similar historical phenomena, such as the Virginia Uprising led by Nat Turner in 1831. The conclusion shows that the slave conspiracy of 1800 was planned in the most careful way, while the reason for its failure was a combination of purely subjective factors. Simultaneously, Gabriel’s failed rebellion demonstrated the vulnerability of the White South in the face of slave uprisings, as well as the high degree of self-organization of the Black community and the beginning of the formation of an African-American identity.

Grants and Acquisitions

The Christiansburg Institute now has the power to tell its rich, century-long story through its self-managed Christiansburg Institute Digital Archive thanks to a $251,052 Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices grant from the Council on Library Information Resources. The University Libraries at Virginia Tech is collaborating with the institute on its grant-funded project, “Changing the Narrative: Modeling Equitable Stewardship of African American Storytelling and History,” to digitize stories, photos, and documents of Christiansburg Industrial Institute—the first high school in Southwest Virginia to educate the formerly enslaved (1866–1966).

The Army’s Last Segregated Unit: Black Prisoners at Camp 5, North Korea

Only the Civil War saw more Black soldiers held prisoner than the Korean Conflict, yet the story of these soldiers has generally been overlooked by both scholars of that war and those of African American military history. Despite President Truman’s 1948 executive order desegregating the armed forces, when hostilities broke out in Korea in 1950, the US Army remained rigidly segregated. As a result, a number of all-Black units were at the front lines early in the conflict when the majority of American soldiers were taken prisoner. Hundreds of Black soldiers found themselves imprisoned for almost three years in North Korea, most at Camp 5 on the Chinese border, where they faced not only extreme deprivation but also racial segregation and communist indoctrination. Based on oral histories and other primary materials, the story of these prisoners from the “forgotten war” is told here.

«Созерцавший Агнца Божия»: Джупитер Хэммон – первый чернокожий христианский поэт Америки

The role of Christianity as a factor that exerted a decisive influence over African American social and cultural history, is being debated time and again in the course of African American studies. The ambivalent attitude of the 18th –19th century Christian preachers and missionaries to slavery, egalitarian tendencies that combined with the idea of humility and resignation, led to contradictions and controversy in the evaluation of the role Christianity played in Afroamerica. The case of Jupiter Hammon (1711 –1806?), a preacher and the first Black Christian poet in America, illustrates the emergence of the basic topoi in the pre-war Blackamerican literary tradition: conversion to Christianity and literacy (enculturation) as two essential conditions for the acknowledgement of Black humanity and ability to integrate into the New World civilization. Jupiter Hammon refused to struggle against slavery; paradoxically, however, his work is an inherent part of both African American religious and cultural history and the New England Christian thought, that engendered Abolitionism and its most famous book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly (1852), based on the concept of the “religious genius” of the African and the “Black redemption” of the greatest American vice, slavery.

Ernest Gaines’s The Tragedy of Brady Sims: A Final Nod to Toni Morrison

This article focuses on Ernest Gaines’s final work, The Tragedy of Brady Sims (2017), which borrows its central motif, filicide, from Toni Morrison’s most celebrated novel, Beloved (1987). Like Beloved, set in the Reconstruction era, Gaines’s post–civil rights novella demonstrates that changes in the law do not directly translate into changes in the hearts and minds of people. After showing how Gaines’s literary techniques help to convey the most pessimistic vision for the future of black men that he ever presented in fiction, the essay ends by placing Gaines’s concern for black men within a wider literary milieu—a context suggesting that, despite Gaines’s tendency to set his stories in the past, he had his eye on the present. The essay also suggests that Gaines’s intertextual linking of his male-focused novel with Morrison’s female-focused one constitutes a gesture toward suturing an African American literary history increasingly segregated by gender.

Grants and Acquisitions

The Library of Congress has acquired the full body of radio producer and sound recordist Jim Metzner’s work, including photographs, handwritten journals, podcasts, storybooks, and, of course, his thousands of recordings. The acquisition commenced shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. The Institute of Museum and Library Services recently announced awards totaling $3,970,069 in Museum Grants for African American History and Culture. The Institute of Museum and Library Services has additionally announced 24 grants totaling $2,194,142 to support Indian tribes and organizations that primarily serve and represent Native Hawaiians.

Race, Religion, Healthcare, and Architecture: Benjamin McAdoo's Pagoda of Medicine

The Pagoda of Medicine, a mid-century modern building, sat on the northern outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee. Located within the Seventh Day Adventist Church's Riverside Sanitarium/Riverside Hospital campus, the building was designed as the medical offices for the African American doctor Carl A. Dent. At its core, the building looks like an International Style box, however its roofline adds a more organic and striking feature that has interested the preservation community in Nashville for years. In addition to its unique structure, the building's African American history increases its historical significance. This paper seeks to identify the site's origins and influences and argues its design resulted directly from three intersections: from the need to symbolize modernity for African American healthcare facilities, from the design style of African American architect Benjamin McAdoo, and from the religious and modern architecture of the Seventh Day Adventist church.

Tuliza Fleming, Museum Curator, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution

Tuliza Fleming, Museum Curator, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution

Arturo Schomburg's Place in an Antiracist Curriculum

In this paper, I argue the benefits of incorporating a study of the life and archival works of scholar Arturo Schomburg into the canon of an antiracist, culturally responsive and sustaining education curriculum. Scholars traditionally study Schomburg in the context of the Latin American independence movements or in relation to his involvement with the Harlem Renaissance. In this paper, I discuss Schomburg's life and show how two of his works, Excerpt from Racial Integrity: A Plea for the Establishment of a Chair of Negro History in Our Schools and Colleges and "A Negro Digs Up His Past," mirror the rhetoric used by antiracist educators and activists today. Finally, I describe the pedagogical merit in Schomburg's archival work as a basis for a culturally responsive and sustaining education unit of study in a New York City high school English class.

African American history in Natasha Trethewey’s “Native Guard”

The article presents interpretations of the poetry collection “Native Guard” of the American writer Natasha Trethewey — the Pulitzer Prize winner (2007), and Poet Laureate (2012–2014). Through the lens of African American and Critical Race studies, Trethewey’s “Native Guard” is analyzed as the artistic Civil War reconstruction which writes the Louisiana Native Guard regiments into national history. Utilizing the wide range of poetic forms in the collections “Domestic Work” (2000), “Bellocq’s Ophelia” (2002), “Thrall” (2012), — ekphrastic poetry, verse-novellas, epistolary poems, rhymed and free verse sonnets, dramatic monologues, in “Native Guard” (2006) Natasha Trethewey experiments with the classical genres of villanelle (“Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi”), ghazal (“Miscegenation”), pantoum (“Incident”), elegy (“Elegy for the Native Guard”), linear palindrome (“Myth”), pastoral (“Pastoral”), sonnet (the ten poems of the crown sonnet sequence “Native Guard”). Following the African American modernist literary canon, Trethewey transforms the traditional forms, infusing blues into sonnets (“Graveyard Blues”), and experimenting with into blank verse sonnets (“What the Body Can Tell”). In the first part of “Native Guard”, the poet pays homage to her African American mother who was married to a white man in the 1960s when interracial marriage was illegal. The book demonstrates the intersections of private memories of Trethewey’s mother, her childhood and personal encounters with the racial oppression in the American South, and the “poeticized” episodes from the Civil War history presented from the perspective of the freed slave and the soldier of the Native Guard, Nathan Daniels. The core poems devoted to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Louisiana regiments in the Union Army formed in 1862, are the crown sonnet sequence which variably combine the formal features of the European classical sonnet and the African American blues poetics. The ten poems are composed as unrhymed journal entries, dated from 1862 to 1865, and they foreground the reflections of the African American warrior on historical episodes of the Civil War focusing on the Native Guard’s involvement in the military duty. In formal aspects, Trethewey achieves the effect of continuity by “binding” together each sonnet and repeating the final line of the poem at the beginning of the following one in the sequence. Though, the “Native Guard” crown sonnet sequence does not fully comply with the rigid structure of the classical European form, Trethewey’s poetic narrative aims at restoring the role of the African American soldiers in the Civil War and commemorating the Native Guard. The final part of the collection synthesizes the two strains – the personal and the historical, accentuating the racial issues in the American South. Through the experience of a biracial Southerner, and via the polemics with the Fugitives, in her poems Natasha Trethewey displays that the Civil Rights Act has not eliminated racial inequality and racism. Trethewey’s extensive experimentation with literary forms and style opens up the prospects for further investigation of the writer’s artistic methods in her poetry collections, autobiographical prose, and nonfiction.

Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature

Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature

Southering and the politics of heritage: the psychogeography of narrating slavery at plantation museums

ABSTRACT This paper argues that an appreciation of the effects of ‘southering’, or the identity discourse of internal orientalism in the U.S., is key to understanding the historical interpretation provided at plantation museums and the challenges associated with narrative transformation at these heritage sites. An analysis of two plantation museums in Louisiana shows that efforts to transform the whitewashed narratives that fail to account for the psychogeography of southering (as reflected in the ‘Southern’ deep story) might prove counterproductive. One solution to this problem is the spatial contextualisation of plantation slavery as not only a regional but also a national and global institution – a contextualisation that is both historically accurate and also has the potential to disarm ‘Southern’ defensiveness through its explicit acknowledgement of the ‘guilt’ and participation of whites in the system of slavery throughout the U.S. (and even globally). What we ultimately argue for is the need to transcend southering, a binary discourse that creates a moral landscape of uneven racism (racist ‘South’/enlightened ‘North’) while at the same time privileging the agency of whites and occluding African American history and agency.

Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press by Kim Gallon

Reviewed by: Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press by Kim Gallon Candace Cunningham (bio) Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press. By Kim Gallon. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020. Pp. x, 216. $110 cloth; $26 paper; $19.95 ebook) In Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press, author Kim Gallon examines how Black newspapers [End Page 103] in the interwar period created "Black sexual public spheres" through textual and visual representations of Black sexuality in editorials, letters to the editor, newspaper articles, and fictional stories. Gallon focuses on some of the most prolific Black newspapers of the time including the Baltimore Afro-American, Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, New York Amsterdam News, and Philadelphia Tribune. Gallon argues the Black press created multiple Black sexual public spheres that both challenged and reinforced conventional understandings of appropriate sexual behavior. These spheres redefined the definition of "race men/women" and introduced sexuality to the interwar definition of Blackness. Despite their mission to engage in racial uplift, Black newspapers regularly covered scandalous stories about African Americans. Simultaneously reporting on scandal and racial justice may have seemed like contradictory pursuits, but it reflected what reporters and editors imagined that their readership's changing demographic wanted. The Great Migration introduced these newspapers to a large working-class audience. Newspapermen believed this audience wanted to hear salacious stories about their "betters." This reporting exposed the Black middle-class' sexual exploits, therefore challenging the concept that such acts were the exclusive purview of the working-class. Gallon's research demonstrates that Black community members learned the same myths about Black women's sexuality as the white community—that respectable Black women were rare and more prone than their white counterparts to engage in sexually deviant behavior. The Black press created a Black sexual sphere that, through their coverage of Black beauty pageants and predatory lesbians, challenged and reinforced these myths. Black newspapers positioned interracial sexual relationships and marriage within the broader issue of racial segregation. They reported on these stories out of a belief that their readers wanted to know more about interracial celebrity couple's intimate lives. Yet, by [End Page 104] the dawn of World War II, Black newspapers were publishing fewer stories on the topic. Instead, they devoted more space to Black participation in the war effort. The Black press' coverage of gender-nonconforming men, gay men, and female impersonators during the 1920s and 1930s reflected an array of attitudes ranging from partial acceptance, to outright rejection. As with the other Black sexual spheres, Black newspapermen created this one because they imagined that their readers wanted visual and textual representations of queer Black men. Yet this period was short-lived. By the late 1930s the coverage was increasingly unfavorable as homosexuality became "synonymous with death of the 'race'" (p. 157). Black newspapers clearly envisioned themselves as conduits of racial progress. However, Gallon's research uncovers that in their efforts to satisfy their readers they also created a space to develop multiple sexual spheres. Pleasure in the News pushes us to reexamine what we think we know about the Black press. Many of us have spent countless hours reviewing Black media publications. They are an invaluable source about Black life, politics, and entertainment. Gallon's research is an important reminder that Black newspapers are also cultural artifacts unto themselves. Their value is not only in what they can teach us about specific people and events, but how they reflect Black American culture. This book will appeal to researchers in African American history, cultural history, gender history, journalism, and queer studies. It will be of particular interest to people who study Black sexuality, the Great Migration, the interwar period, and American migration and urbanization. [End Page 105] Candace Cunningham CANDACE CUNNINGHAM is an assistant professor of history at Florida Atlantic University. She recently published an article, "'Hell is Popping Here in South Carolina': Orangeburg County Black Teachers and Their Community in the Immediate Post-Brown Era" in The History of Education Quarterly. She is currently working on a manuscript about the role of Black teachers in the civil...

Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space and Sound in American Cultural History, by Christopher J. Smith

<i>Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space and Sound in American Cultural History</i>, by Christopher J. Smith

Black Gold: A Black Feminist Art History of 1920s Montréal

The 1920s have been touted as the golden era of jazz and Black history in Montréal. Similarly, the decade is well known for the Harlem Renaissance, a key moment in African American art history. Yet this period in Black Canadian art histories remains largely unknown. As a first step toward shedding some light on this period in Black Canadian art history, I propose to use what I term a Black feminist art-historical (bfah) praxis to discuss some visual art practices undoubtedly active alongside well-known jazz musicians and cultural producers in 1920s Montréal. This paper presents an overview of critical race art history and feminist art history, as well as Black feminist approaches to visual representation, to outline what might be considered four tenets of bfah praxis. Applying these tenets, I propose that a new art history may emerge from well-known art objects and practices as well as lesser-known ones. I posit that through a deliberately bfah approach, new meanings emerge and the voices of Black women, even when obstructed by mainstream white narratives, may begin to stand out and shed light upon a variety of histories. This praxis aims to underline the subtext lurking at the edges of these images and to make intangible presences visible in the archive and in art history. I propose bfah as a strategy for more nuanced discussion of the work of Black Canadian artists and histories that have by and large been left out of official records.

African American History Index

African American History Index Get access Journal of American History, Volume 108, Issue 3, December 2021, Pages 545–569, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaab348 Published: 01 December 2021