Black Aspirations Research Articles

Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture by Stefanie K. Dunning

Reviewed by: Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture by Stefanie K. Dunning Claudia J. Ford Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture. By Stefanie K. Dunning. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. xv + 193 pp. $99.00 hardcover/$25.00 paper/$18.99 e-book. In Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, Stefanie K. Dunning weaves together key concepts that frame the relationship between Black people and the environment, namely, ideas about pastoral return, wilderness, the natural world, land, and property. Focusing on contemporary culture, Dunning offers ecocritical readings of Beyoncé's Lemonade (2016); Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991); Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones (2011); Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012); Queen Sugar (2016), produced by Ava DuVernay; Kaitlyn Greenidge's We Love You, Charlie Freeman (2014); Colm McCarthy's The Girl with All the Gifts (2016); and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993). Her book provides thought-provoking insights on Black freedom and its relationship to environmental consciousness. Black feminist scholars will find much to value in Dunning's descriptions of the relationships among Black life, Black women, and the environment. She analyzes the mechanisms through which anti-Blackness is visited upon the bodies and lives of Black women. However, she makes explicit that the theoretical frame of her book is Afropessimism and critical race theory, not ecofeminism. Rather, she reminds us that all of the examined texts "feature [End Page 127] Black women and/or girls as their protagonists or are authored by Black women" (24), which for Dunning is significant because "the liberation of the Black woman is the liberation of the world" (25). Dunning assesses how natural spaces have been constructed and represented for Black people, going far beyond the truism that the Black experience of the natural world is shaped by racism. She identifies three critical ruptures between Black people and the environment imposed by white supremacy: the interpretive frame of primitivism, the violent regimes of chattel slavery, and lynching. In her close readings, Dunning discusses depictions of Black life—and social death—and the ways Black people attempt to resist these white-supremacist violences committed against Black bodies and spaces. In fact, she argues, "A stunning parallelism characterizes the treatment of both the natural world and Black people" (10). Black to Nature closely examines these associations among the abuse of nature, the oppression of Black people, and the exploitation that structures Black life. It is not necessary to have read the novels or seen the films to grasp the points Dunning makes. Her purpose is to probe the correctives to anti-Blackness, the possibilities explored in literature and life for Black liberation from oppression along with Black investment in nature. Her thesis is that "natural spaces in Black texts are adjacent to this notion of abolition, that they signal the end of civil society—which would be the end of anti-Blackness—as we know it" (21). Dunning's work is profoundly scholarly; at times the language is dense, as when she explains Afropessimism, Black social death, Black liberation, and other theoretical concepts covered in the book. Still, this is a readable text, and Dunning deftly brings the reader along in her readings of popular culture that represent Black aspirations for freedom through relationships to the natural world. Dunning's readings engage pressing contemporary subjects including misogynoir, Black Lives Matter, Blackhood, water as a Black metaphorical trope, animal rights, the child welfare system, Indigenous ecological knowledge, land rematriation and property rights, Indigenous and African American relationships, homelessness, placelessness, and the imaginations and communications of the plant world. Dunning interweaves these fascinating topics skillfully and succinctly, always supporting her central points about the potential for the natural world to mediate Black aspirations—indeed, human aspirations—for abolition and freedom. Introspection emerges as both strategy and subtext of Dunning's book. Even as she diagnoses the ruptures between Black life and nature initiated by white [End Page 128] Enlightenment thinking and elucidates the entrenched anti-Blackness of civil society, she inserts snippets of her own contemplative practices as examples of Black thriving and environmental connection. While exploring Black...

The African Methodist Episcopal Church: A History

On 17 June 2015 a white supremacist invaded Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and opened fire on a Bible study group. Nine members were killed, including the pastor, Clementa Pinckney. Pinckney had been a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives and of the State Senate, as well as an AME minister, and the eulogy at his funeral was given by President Barack Obama. The story of the Charleston atrocity and its aftermath says much about the history of the AME, the largest of the black Methodist denominations, capturing its courageous and risky witness against injustice, its role in giving institutional expression to black aspirations, and its success in claiming a recognized place in the polity and public life of the United States. These themes, and more besides, are explored in Dennis Dickerson's magisterial history of the denomination.Professor Dickerson is well qualified to write the history of the AME Church. As the substantial bibliography to the present volume shows, he has been publishing on related subjects for more than two decades, and he has amassed an extensive knowledge of the primary and secondary sources. Here he presents a chronological account, beginning with the development of African Methodism in North America and the Caribbean, and describing the origins of the AME in the work of Richard Allen (1760–1831). Allen's departure from St George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1787 rooted the AME in an Exodus narrative that continued to be significant as a new denomination gradually took shape. Formally constituted in 1816, with Allen as its first bishop, the AME grew steadily through the nineteenth century, seeing itself as ‘a Creole church for the Atlantic world’ (106).Dickerson shows how building the infrastructure of the denomination, including flagship institutions like Wilberforce University in Ohio, could sometimes sit uncomfortably with the AME's ‘insurgent’ emphases, with commentators like Frederick Douglass criticizing the AME leadership, albeit unfairly, for failing to prioritize the cause of abolition. During the era of Reconstruction the AME grew rapidly in the southern states of the United States; thereafter, economic pressures and the impact of ‘Jim Crow’ segregation led to a massive migration to the industrial and urban north in the decades around World War I. Both developments posed challenges and opportunities for the denomination in ministering to new populations and addressing deep human needs. The narrative here weaves together the broad themes of political, social, and ecclesiastical history with case studies of individuals like Winfield H. Mixon, of Alabama, Bishop Henry M. Turner, the Social Gospellers Reverdy and Emma Ransom, and the Garveyite R. H. Tobitt. The final chapters discuss the civil rights years and the AME's sense of being a global church by the closing decades of the twentieth century.The tension between institution and insurgency surfaces in each chapter: over abolitionism before the Civil War and Tuskegee-style strategies in the ‘Jim Crow’ era; over responses to Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and proto-apartheid in South Africa; over civil rights and equal rights. But other themes emerge: pressure for indigenous rather than African American leadership in AME churches in Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America; challenges to episcopal autocracy and occasional abuses of power; the call to recognize and fully affirm the ministry and leadership of women. Dickerson acknowledges that ‘respectable’ AME congregations sometimes proved less than welcoming to southern migrants and African musical traditions, and that the AME lost ground to Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal denominations at the beginning and end of the twentieth century, although he records the success of AME megachurches like Allen Cathedral in Jamaica, New York. He also notes that the United Methodist Church had a far better record of appointing black women bishops than the AME, although twenty-first-century General Conferences worked hard to redress this situation.Threaded through this history is an insistence that those nurtured in the AME Church remembered their heritage, and that the denomination continued to draw on its African and Methodist origins. AME heritage mattered to Shirley Graham Du Bois and to Dave Chappelle, and the AME retains its place within the structures of World Methodism. How the Wesleys' Methodism and its later expressions are inflected in a worldwide denomination that is nonetheless predominantly African American in membership and ethos remains a fascinating phenomenon.Grateful thanks are due to Dennis Dickerson for this thoroughly researched and beautifully written study of one of World Methodism's most significant branches.

N*ggas in Paris: hip-hop in exile

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the meaning potentials of the exportation of American commercial rap music (exemplified via rap stars Kanye West and Jay Z) through the metaphorical lens of the discourse of exile. This perspective opens a view to Black aspirations as a vagabond, deviant, unsettled, search for the good life. Using, for example, the uptake of West and Jay Z's song, ‘Niggas in Paris,’ in a socialist party candidate's platform ad to attract aspiring immigrant communities in France, both privileged and disadvantaged diasporic Africans, or Afropolitans, as argued herein, are of the world; but do not, necessarily, experience first-class citizenship, despite the state of their mobility. Additional examinations of digital, sonic, lyrical and material art are undertaken by the author to reveal the search for deeper meaning and freedom among Afrodiasporic populations within the United States and globally.

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Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools, by Amanda E. Lewis and John B. Diamond. Cary, NC: Oxford University Press, 2015, 249 pp., $27.95, hardback.The book Despite the Best Intentions highlights the complexity of the problem of the achievement gap and racism throughout public education, through a case study method of a high school. The book explores the racial disparities in a diverse and highly funded school, within a community that affords the school with a steady stream of financial support, in a liberal city. The city attracts perspective residents due to the diversity within the community. The school, however, is almost completely racially segregated. Students in "low" or "basic" level classes are often Black and Latina/o, while the honors and Advanced Placement (AP) classes are majority White students.The tone of the book is one of acknowledgment yet bewilderment. Bewilderment because school staff are aware of the problems but struggle to enact policies that change the racial segregation of the school. In each chapter teachers, students, and staff members of the school acknowledge the segregation and discrimination within the school, however, are unclear on how to rectify the situation, or unwilling to create change. For example, in chapter three, the authors state that there are patterns of implementation of discipline at Riverview, differential selection, a focus on minority student behavior, and the intermingling of race, class, gender, and cultural style that affected students' interactions with school officials. "The coupling of more subtle forms of discrimination with a color-blind discourse on racial inequality has made it more difficult for people to know when discriminatory practices are at work" (p. 24). The authors explore the Black community and their perceptions within the school. Many of the Black students believed that others feel as though they have no aspirations for high achievement but the truth is contrary to that. "Black students' educational aspirations are actually higher than those held by white students across multiple datasets" (p. 28). The authors also explore the culture of the Black students within the school. They found that Blacks were not bullied for being smart, in fact, students are more likely to bully low-performing students. The authors also discuss the "attitude-achievement paradox." This paradox is one that acknowledges that Black students have goals of getting a postsecondary education but did worse in K-12. They also report studying and paying attention more than the White students, and they understood less of the content than White students and are less likely to turn in homework. This paradox is at the heart of the racial achievement gap. While Black students want to get a postsecondary education, the K-12 education system fails to adequately prepare them. Many students report feeling as though there are two schools in one.Riverview High School uses a tracking system to categorize students into basic and advanced. Those who were not in honors classes in 8th grade or recommended by a teacher, enter Riverview in the basic track. This track contains all the required classes; however, the rigor is significantly lower than the advanced track. Also, those in the basic track are taught by new or ineffective teachers. While those who were in advanced classes or excelled in 8th grade are placed on the advanced track, which includes honors and Advance Placement (AP) classes with the best teachers in the school. There are few Black students in the advanced track, which causes feelings of alienation of those Black students. Those students who are on the basic track realize that the school has little hope and low expectations from them. This dynamic is a constant reminder of the privilege of the White students and the lack of opportunity for Black students. Beyond a lack of academic success, Black students also experience racism and discrimination within the discipline system of the school. …

"Politics of Defiance": Uncovering the Causes and Consequences of Lynching and Communal Violence

When acts of lynching were first seared into the consciousness of the nation, Ida B. Wells-Barnett recognized them as attacks not only against individuals but also against the “peoplehood” of African Americans. The dehumanizing nature of mob violence enabled white majorities to rationalize laws and norms that effectively denied blacks the full rights of citizenship. Ironically, for much of the twentieth century scholars attempted to comprehend lynching through the actions of perpetrators rather than through the perspective of victims. Historians attributed lynching to lax attitudes toward law, the cult of southern honor, the need to reaffirm traditional hierarchical power relationships, and white-black psychosexual tensions channeled into ritualized killings that helped preserve the economic and social preeminence of southern white males. A discernible shift in focus, however, was evident at Emory University’s 2002 conference, “Lynching and Racial Violence in America: Histories and Legacies,” which featured the insights of over ninety scholars and was held in conjunction with an explicit photographic exhibit that literally put the horrific effects of lynching at the center of academic consciousness. Michael J. Pfeifer’s superlative survey of recent scholarship on lynching suggests that a synthesis may now be emerging that could reconcile earlier work focused on the motivations of white perpetrators with newer insights that consider the perspective of minority victims and the impact that lynching had on communities.1 By broadening the spatial and temporal dimensions of lynching research, scholars have been able to move beyond seemingly intractable debates about the causes of communal violence. The highly contested relationship between the nature of southern law enforcement and lynching, for instance, has been resolved through Pfeifer’s consideration of lynching in a larger national context. In Rough Justice he contends that lynching resulted from a cultural war pitting rural and working-class advocates of “rough justice” against middle-class supporters of “due process.” Hence, lynching resulted not so much from ineffectual systems of law enforcement as from many rural whites’ deeply ambivalent feelings about the law and its ability to constrain the social aspirations of blacks. This conflict

The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865–1944 by Glenn Feldman (review)

Reviewed by: The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865–1944 by Glenn Feldman Joshua D. Farrington (bio) The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865– 1944. By Glenn Feldman. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013. Pp. 480. $49.95 cloth) Glenn Feldman’s brilliantly edited compilation of essays, Painting Dixie Red: When, Where, Why, and How the South Became Republican (2011), stands out among a multitude of contemporary books as one of the most nuanced accounts of the rise of the Solid Republican South. His most recent work, The Irony of the Solid South, on the other hand, approaches the subject with a determined focus that ignores, trivializes, and dismisses historical nuances and takes a rhetorical sledgehammer to demolish any contrary interpretations. To Feldman, historians should not be shocked that a region that once was the heart of the Democratic Party so rapidly has become the soul of the Republican Party. Instead, he enthusiastically and doggedly, though not always convincingly, lays out a case that rather than representing a new phase in southern politics, the “switch” in southern voting patterns did not represent a change at all. Instead, it denoted the continued persistence of a conservative ideology that has dominated southern political coalitions from the Bourbon Democrats of the late nineteenth century to the Tea Party Republicans of today. Although the title of the work implies a focus on “the South,” this study confines itself almost exclusively to Alabama. Using an impressive array of political sources that range from speeches delivered by leading politicians to unpublished writings of average citizens, Feldman argues that southern elites successfully “melded” economic conservatism to racial conservatism, creating a post-Reconstruction ideology that ultimately destroyed any hopes of southern liberalism. [End Page 524] He is at his best when he systematically (through a series of chapters on the New Deal) demolishes the historiographically popular notion that the 1930s and 1940s represented the apex of southern “liberalism.” Although southern politicians initially supported the New Deal out of necessity and loyalty to the Democratic Party, by the time Franklin Roosevelt (and his wife) became associated with the aspirations of blacks, even the most “liberal” Democrats began to abandon ship. Feldman further obliterates the notion within much of the current literature that there existed meaningful differences between racial demagogues like J. Thomas Heflin and their more genteel “paternalist” counterparts. Both, as Feldman persuasively argues, were white supremacists adamantly opposed to any changes in the racial status quo—the only difference between them existed in style, not substance. Although The Irony of the Solid South offers a brilliant analysis of Alabama politics during the first half of the twentieth century, it fails to make a case that extends throughout the South. This is particularly true as it relates to Kentucky, a state Feldman himself lists as “southern.” Racism and white supremacy certainly infected Kentucky’s body politic, but unlike in Alabama, its African American residents could vote. By the 1920s, even Democrats, particularly in Louisville, had to temper their approach to racial politics. Moreover, Republicans—even moderates and liberals such as Thruston Morton and John Sherman Cooper—found electoral victory in statewide races by supporting civil rights measures and actively courting black voters. Because Feldman’s focus is strictly on Alabama, a state that systematically disenfranchised African Americans, black actors are completely absent from his story. Had he extended his reach to the entire South, he would have been forced to address pockets of influential black voters that dramatically reshaped the direction of local politics by the 1930s in some cities, including Louisville, Memphis, Atlanta, St. Louis, and Baltimore. One of Feldman’s overall objectives is to challenge the plethora of recent works that seek to minimize the role of race in the rise of the Republican Party. Historians in the mold of Donald Critchlow have [End Page 525] dominated recent historiography by emphasizing non-racial factors that account for the rise of the modern right. Feldman, on the other hand, describes this same post-1968 incarnation of conservatism as “New Racism.” Although he seeks to challenge opponents who downplay racism as the foundation of the New Right, Feldman does not engage...

Charles Chesnutt’s Dilemma: Professional Ethics, Social Justice, and Domestic Feminism in The Marrow of Tradition

Only the Black Woman can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.' --Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South Over the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in Charles Chesnutt's work, reclaiming his multifaceted narratives and stunning stylistic strategies as he strove to give voice to black aspirations in an increasingly segregated America. Unlike his earlier dialect tales, which were enthusiastically reviewed in the white press, The Marrow of Tradition, his 1901 novel known to be a fictional recreation of the Wilmington, North Carolina race riot of 1898 in which at least nineteen black men and women were murdered, received only a lukewarm response at its publication. (1) William Dean Howells called it a bitter, bitter book and others commented on its lack of artistry (Pickens 49, 82). Recent criticism, however, has reclaimed and reevaluated the novel, giving particular attention to the stylistic inventiveness of one of its several plots, and exploring the possible meanings of his text for the white audience we know was his primary target (Chesnutt 50). Chesnutt's complex narrative invites such a focus. Its private, plot, introduced and developed in the early chapters, traces the legacy of slavery through a host of minor characters: Colonel and Tom Delamere, Sandy (Delamere's lifelong servant), Olivia Carteret and her Aunt Polly, and Josh Green (a sharecropper's son who had promised his mother he would kill the man who lynched his father), reaching its climax when Sandy is accused of murdering Aunt Polly. With the rescue of the innocent Sandy by the Colonel and the banishment of Delamere's son, who is exposed as the true murderer, this plot line seems resolved. However, two other parallel narratives remain unfinished as Tom slinks off the page. In the novel's concluding chapters, the and worlds of postbellum Wellington as well as their respective racial and gender relations emerge more clearly. The public and apparently major plot involves the white leaders of Wellington (Major Carteret, General Belmont, and McBane, a slave driver turned entrepreneur), as they try to reestablish their political supremacy in a town threatened by the success of the Fusion party with the collapse of Reconstruction and the growing ascendancy of Jim Crow. Their manipulations end in an outbreak of white violence against the black population. Paralleling both the and plots is the novel's professional narrative which traces the return to Wellington of black physician Dr. Miller from his medical studies with his mixed-race wife Janet (half sister to Carteret's wife Olivia) and their son to establish a medical practice and build a black hospital. It is Miller's standing and Janet's familial connections that allow them to circulate, though not penetrate, through the white community and provide a glimpse into the instability of the racial and social order that governs the town. After the freeing of Sandy and the subsequent outbreak of white violence, the and plot lines converge. When no white doctor is available to treat Major and Olivia Carteret's sickly child, Dodie, they solicit help from Dr. Miller. Only then do the Carterets learn that the white mob, instigated by Carteret, has killed the Millers' only son. Balanced against the novel's opening chapters, these concluding chapters also occur in a private, domestic setting: the Miller home, where Janet stands beside the body of her murdered son. Standard critical readings of The Marrow of Tradition focus on the Delamere-Sandy sentimental narrative and the public, realistic plot that overtly condemns the white community's assault on the black. But they steer clear of the professional plot and the concluding two chapters by claiming that they are ambiguous; after all, at the end of the novel, we do not know if Dr. …

Code of Professional Practice at Stake? Race, Representation and Professionalism in British Education

Sizeable studies have been conducted on the work and experiences of teachers and headteachers in general. Most of these studies do not examine black teachers' professional lives. However, recently, a body of literature which addresses the invisibility of black teachers' professional lives seems to be growing. Studying teachers' experiences from the race-'social race' perspective is particularly important in the context of concerns raised by the Macpherson report on the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, incited by the new Labour Government's deracialised educational policy initiatives such as Performance Related Pay (PRP) and caused by the current serious shortage of teachers in Britain. This article critically scrutinises the credibility of professionalism in the teaching profession by drawing on evidence from the existing literature. Substantiated arguments have been put forward on what effect an individual's race can have on black teachers' career aspirations and progression regardless of their high level of professionalism in teaching. While the article primarily deals with black teachers' experiences, it also includes some experiences of ethnic minority teachers. Some ethnic and race data on ethnic minority people are aggregated in official statistics. The potential implications of these statistics for the teaching profession and race relations are presented. A possible way forward has been also proposed.

A Fair Defense of a False Start: A Reply to Kenneth Himma

above, Kenneth Himma argues for a limited permission to prefer candidates for admission to educational opportunities and for employment on the basis of color or gender. With this argument, he steps into the middle of a controversy by now 30 years in the festering, to which at a much earlier date we have contributed. We argued that all such preferences were unjustified, and that seems to disagree with Himma’s thesis, hence the invitation to take him on. We do so with great gusto. Our first task will be to get very clear on just what Himma does say and does not say, so that we do not end up boxing with straw men in our defense. His claim, as we take it, is that the Fair Start Defense (FSD) of Affirmative Action (racial and sexual preference) Programs, as applied to hiring and admissions decisions, can be grounded in the data available for the academic (especially) accomplishments of women and AfricanAmericans. The data show no particular correlation between academic achievement and “self-esteem,” but do show a correlation between academic achievement and the importance attached to that achievement by the student. For the first reason, the defense of racial integration (and therefore of certain kinds of preferences) in education presented by the Court in Brown vs. School Board in 1954, must fail. The Court took judicial notice of the fact that “separate” is inherently unequal since the fact of segregation damages the self-esteem of the black child and therefore makes it impossible for him to compete on equal terms from that point on. That turns out to be false; there is no correlation between academic achievement and measures of selfesteem. But there is evidence that African Americans and women at least attribute less importance to academic achievement than their peers of a different racial heritage or gender configuration, as Himma points out. Therefore it can be argued that the institutionalized racism and sexism that figures so largely in our nation’s recent history has had an adverse effect on the goals and aspirations of blacks and women. From that it can be surmised that they may be expected (if no action is taken) to continue to be underrepresented in the advantageous schools and jobs. In the competition for such favored positions, they must start behind the line from which their lighter and more advantaged brothers begin, and therefore it cannot appear to be unjust to allow those preferences which amount to constructing a fair start to the race. Even as, in a footrace in which one runner starts ahead of the gun, it will seem proper to penalize that runner in calculating A Fair Defense of a False Start: A Reply to Kenneth Himma Lisa Newton

Schooling, Modernization, and Race: The Continuing Dilemma of the American SouthSchooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920. James L. LeloudisTheir Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South. Vanessa Siddle Walker

Throughout much of the twentieth century, American education has remained a stepchild of mainstream historical scholarship, while the history of southern education has, until recently, been relegated to the status normally reserved for a poor relation of dubious family lineage. Among the numerous obstacles to the development of a full-blown historiography of southern education, none has been more constraining than the unwritten code of racialist orthodoxy that blighted the region's academic life for several generations, giving rise to a bevy of semiofficial histories in which school progress unfolded in a manner that was at once celebratory of white accomplishments and casually dismissive of black aspirations. Until the end of World War II, schooling's central place in the complex machinery of racial segregation discouraged all but a handful of dissident intellectuals-many of them African-Americans-from looking critically at the social meaning of formal learning in the states of the former Confederacy. The two North Carolina studies under review attest to the distance

"Acting White": Is It the Silent Killer of the Educational Aspirations of Inner-City Blacks?

"Acting White": Is It the Silent Killer of the Educational Aspirations of Inner-City Blacks?

Gabriel's Republican Rebellion

Several years ago, a panel of distinguished scholars convened at Monticello to discuss the turbulent topic of Thomas Jefferson and race. Comments ranged from defensive explanations of the racial attitudes of our third president to the irreconcilable question of his relationship with Sally Hemmings. Never during the two-hour exchange did any expert question if Jefferson's slaves, or any other Virginia blacks, ever comprehended his egalitarian ideology. This singular oversight continues in a recent, highly critical collection of essays, aptly entitled Jeffersonian Legacies.1 Similarly, though Jefferson's influence on the formation of working-class radicalism is now well-understood, no scholar has heretofore systematically connected artisan republicanism with the aspirations of free or enslaved blacks in the early republic. Using the lessons of artisan republicanism to explain African American history is but one of the many virtues in Douglas Egerton's incisive analysis of Gabriel's Rebellion of 1800, and its aftermath two years later. Since Herbert Aptheker first pointed attention to the political tenor of Gabriel's calls for slave revolt, few studies of slave conspiracies have failed to mention Gabriel's partisan appeals.2 Egerton is the first to apply theoretically consistent microhistory to this conspiracy. In his sinewy narrative, Gabriel emerges as an assertive, literate artisan, fully aware of other insurrections around the Atlantic basin. The slave blacksmith shared with white artisans a small producer ideology and trusted that white mechanics would support his struggle for liberty. That Gabriel failed to understand racial barriers to revolutionary unity does not undermine the significance of his attempt. Egerton's book is precisely organized. Historical articulation of rebellion demands an engaging narrative style, so Egerton eschews problem-solving on the surface of his story, preferring to debate other interpretations in his introduction and extensive notes. The introduction also serves to correct historical misperceptions of Gabriel's name, hair-style, and, importantly,

Railroad Subsidies and Black Aspirations: The Politics of Economic Development in Reconstruction Mobile, 1865-1879

Railroad Subsidies and Black Aspirations: The Politics of Economic Development in Reconstruction Mobile, i865-1879 Michael W. Fitzgerald among the less fortunate side effects of the "revisionism" that swept Reconstruction historiography in the 1960s and 1970s was a tendency to overlook issues that interfered with the rehabilitation of Radical Reconstruction . However natural or even necessary as a correction to the racist views previously dominating the field, revisionists deemphasized certain topics stressed by the older Dunning school. For example, only one serious study of government aid for economic development has appeared in decades, a situation Mark W. Summers described as "astonishing."1 The railroad program deserves attention in that it influenced the future of African-American political activity, if only because black and white Republicans received the blame for its shortcomings. It is to such neglected subjects that we must turn for fresh insights into the economic and class issues raised by Reconstruction, rather than the narrowly racial topics that received so much attention from revisionist scholars. An examination of the experience of one city suggests surprising complexity in how development issues unfolded at the local level. In Mobile, Alabama, black political influence, and Reconstruction in general , provided the context rather than the cause of the city's disastrous economic subsidy program. On the surface, it would seem difficult to find a more unlikely candidate for historical rehabilitation than Republican rule in Mobile. During the ReI would like to acknowledge the assistance of Judy Kutulas, Michael Johnson, Jonathan McLeod, Ralph Poore, Lawrence Powell, Peter Rachleff, Mark Summers, Margaret Washington, and especially Jay Higginbotham and the staff of the Mobile Municipal Archives. 1 Mark W. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel ofProsperity: Aid under the Radical Republicans, 1865-1877 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), ix. Civil War History, Vol. XXXIX, No. 3, © 1993 by The Kent State University Press ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN MOBILE24I construction era, and primarily under the "Radical" Republican leadership of Mayor George F. Harrington, a series of railroad bond measures and other projects were funded, resulting in a large increase in municipal debt. The two subsidized railroads failed and went unbuilt for decades, while Mobile itself went bankrupt, forfeited its city charter, and spent the next half century struggling to pay off a scaled-down municipal debt. In the 1870s the Redeemer Democrats, and their Dunning school apologists thereafter, aggressively blamed corrupt black and carpetbagger officials for the city's fiscal downfall . The few scholarly discussions of the episode generally have followed their lead, for example, Don H. Doyle's recent New Men, New Cities, New South reaffirmed the responsibility of the Republicans for the episode. Doyle maintained that "several railroad projects launched during the Radical era" bankrupted Mobile, and "most of these were sullied by corruption." Radical sponsorship, he notes, thus "discredited" future civic improvement programs.2 While such descriptions are factually accurate, they convey a misleading impression of the human agency of these events. The impetus for the subsidy program came from the changing economic situation and how Mobile's business leaders chose to respond to these changes. At the time of the Civil War, Mobile was the fourth largest city in the Confederacy and at the apex of its economic influence. With Appomattox, though, unwelcome changes brought crisis to the city's economy. A devastating ammunition explosion in May 1865 leveled much ofthe downtown warehouse district. More critically for the long run, the expanding postwar railroad network undermined Mobile's geographic dominance of Alabama's river commerce. Interior towns, like Selma and Montgomery, tapped into the cotton trade, which increasingly was diverted via railroad to the east. The "factor" system of cotton merchandising , which had bolstered Mobile's prewar economic power, now unraveled under the strain of these developments. By the end of the 1 860s Mobile's cotton trade had been cut in half, while wartime migration added thousands to the city's population, especially the large numbers of freedmen who settled around the city's expanding periphery. Emancipation and economic decline thus brought labor conflict and social turmoil in their wake, just as Reconstruction clouded the political picture.3 With the advantage of hindsight, it is possible to say that Mobile's economic decline...

Blacks in the News: Television, Modern Racism and Cultural Change

Local news may be one vehicle through which television helps, inadvertently, both to preserve and to transform cultural values. Content analysis on the evening news on four Chicago television stations over a lengthy period suggests local television responds to viewing tastes of black audiences. However, data on these Chicago television news programs suggest racism still may be indirectly encouraged by normal crime and political coverage that depict blacks, in crime, as more physically threatening and, in politics, as more demanding than comparable white activists or leaders. Ironically, widespread employment of black television journalists suggests to viewers that racial discrimination is no longer a significant social problem. The mix of these two views of blacks encourages modern white racism—hostility, rejection and denial toward black aspirations—the study argues.

Federalism Vindicated: University Desegregation in South Carolina and Alabama, 1962–1963

By the 1950s, two contrasting strategies of white leadership were emerging in the South: “massive resistance” and “moderation.” Both were equally committed in principle to a defense of segregation, but they employed different tactics: The former trumpeted “defiance,” the later counseled “delay.” The strategists of-“massive resistance,” who for a decade largely dominated politics in Alabama and Mississippi, were convinced that any concession, even a tactical one, would be a dangerous break in the dike of segregation. They believed that defiance could deter the federal government from enforcing the university desegregation decisions and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954; 1955). On the other hand, the strategists of “moderation,” who gained political ascendancy in South Carolina, maneuvered within the law, first to postpone implementation of Brown, and then to determine the minimum amount of desegregation that blacks would accept, which would not at the same time inflame white racists. In effect, they used skillful tactics of delay to “moderate” both white racism and black aspirations. Ultimately, they were more successful in achieving their objectives than the resisters, because they avoided sweeping federal interventions.

Issues in the political economy of health in Southern Africa.

Over the past few years there have been major political developments in southern Africa. In the Republic of South Africa, the National Party's short-lived reformist strategy designed to buy off black discontent and to restructure apartheid in order to meet the changing demands of the economy has simply further fuelled black aspirations for their legitimate share of political and economic power. While some of the reforms may change the character of apartheid, South Africa's rulers have shown themselves to be as determined as ever to maintain white domination and their economic and political control of the sub-continent. They are neither willing nor able to engage in negotiations over genuine power-sharing, as the failure of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Mission and the declaration of a fresh State of Emergency in the Republic on the 12th July 1986 have dramatically illustrated. Commonwealth hopes for a peaceful settlement were brought to an abrupt end by South Africa's military assault on the states of Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana. The Republic's onslaught against its neighbours reveals the intrinsic connection between apartheid and the well-being of people in the surrounding states. In the countries of the sub-continent and in South Africa itself these political and economic developments have had their repercussions in the health sphere. Violence and preventable diseases have taken an increasing toll, yet fewer resources are available for dealing with them as military preparations swallow up vast sums of money. In our report to the WHO conference on health and apartheid held in Brazzaville in 1981, we talked of the hidden violence in South Africa: the decimation of the black population by preventable diseases of infancy; the systematic destruction of family life and human health under the migrant labour system; the inadequate protection of workers' lives and safety; the deep insecurity and violence of township life; and the humiliation and degradation forced upon the majority of the population as second class citizens. 1 All these forms of violence have continued unchanged, deepened if anything by the current civil war. Despite the talk of reform, and limited changes in legislation, the racial discrepancies in the incidence of the diseases of poverty and deprivation such as tuberculosis, malnutrition and associated infections have if anything become starker. Although the South African state adopted as rhetoric many of the recommendations of the WHO Alma Ata conference on primary health care,

Career Values and Aspirations of Adult Female and Male Puerto Ricans, Blacks, and Anglos

This exploratory investigation found significant variations in career values among adults of Puerto Rican, Black, and Anglo ethnic and cultural backgrounds, but no distinct differences in career aspirations.

The Paarl Insurrection: A South African Uprising

At half past two, early in the morning of Thursday, November 22nd, 1962, 250 men carrying axes, pangas and various self-made weapons left the Mbekweni location and marched on Paarl, a small town in South Africa's Western Cape. On the outskirts of the city the marchers formed two groups, one destined for the prison where the intention was to release prisoners, the other to make an attack on the police station. Before the marchers reached Paarl's boundaries, the police received warning of their approach from a bus driver. Police patrols set out and one of these encountered the marchers In Paarl's Main Street. Having lost the advantage of surprise, the marchers in Main Street began to throw stones at cars, shop windows, and any police vans which they came across on their way to the police station. The police at the station were armed with Sten guns and rifles in anticipation of the attack. At ten minutes past four between seventy-five and a hundred men advanced on the station throwing stones. When the attackers came within twenty-five yards of the station the police opened fire killing two. The marchers then broke into smaller groups and several were arrested or shot during their retreat. Some of the men who had taken part in the assault on Paarl police station met up in Loop Street with the group that was marching on the prison. These men regrouped and embarked on an attack of the inhabitants of Loop Street, breaking into houses and assaulting people in the street. A seventeen year old girl and a young man were killed and four other people wounded. According to police evidence, five insurgents were killed and fourteen wounded. By five o'clock, the Paarl uprising was over; police reinforcements had arrived from Cape Town and the men from Mbekweni were in full retreat. This paper has two purposes. One is to provide an analysis of the causes of the Paarl disturbance. In the literature on black South African opposition movements, the events in Paarl are scarcely mentioned. This is at least partly because the participants were not politically very sophisticated or articulate; they are consequently difficult to write about. The neglect of the events in Paarl can also be attributed to a bias in much of the relevant scholarship: the emphasis of historical studies has been on black ideological response and has tended to focus on the most fluent articulants of black aspirations.

L'apparition d'un nouveau Zimbabwe dans une Afrique australe en mutation : origines et répercussions

The rise of the new Zimbabwe in a changing Southern Africa: origins and repercussions, by John Barrat In 1974, the collapse of Portugal's domination of Angola and Mozambique turned international attention to Southern Africa and to the future of Rhodesia in particular. Regional negotiations, organised on the initiative of Vorster and Kaunda, then the Geneva Conference in 1979, were unsuccessful and led to an escalation of the conflict. An internal settlement supported by the South Africans, who sought to apply it in Namibia, was also a failure. The 1979 elections and the victory of Muzorewa did not put an end to the conflicts, which strengthened the position of those who refused to recognise Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. The support brought by the United States and the Commonwealth to the Lancaster House agreements and the massive polling give all the more credit to Robert Mugabe's victory in February 1980. His conciliatory and realistic attitude prevented the exodus of the Whites. The pro blems of Zimbabwe remain nonetheless difficult to solve: reconstruction of the economy, unemployment, the need of land reform, ethnic problems, maintaining of unity in the country and within Mugabe's party. If political stability is maintained and economic growth achieved, this new state can be expected to play a leading role in Africa and in the Third World generally. Already the existence of Zimbabwe is reducing the economic and political influence of South Africa in the region and may lead Pretoria to rethink the Namibian problem and to consider negotiating with all the parties engaged in the conflict. The victory of Mugabe will undoubtedly reinforce black aspirations for a political change which the tide of history cannot halt.

Hope in Adult Development Among Afro-Americans

The intent of this particular line of research is to determine the extent to which perceived racial discrimination affects the vocational and social aspirations of young black adults living in the urban North. It is contended that the period between adolescence and mid-young adulthood marks a very critical period of development for certain black young adults experiencing direct racial discrimination and social inequities. Blacks perceiving themselves in racially inequitable situations will initially demonstrate their concerns in a stressful manner. How the young black copes with perceived inequity in the work world will significantly affect future occupations and social attainments. The research analyses of black achievement orientation and occupational aspirations has produced a good deal of controversy in recent years. Studies have shown a low achievement orientation for blacks while other research has demonstrated incongruously high levels of vocational and social aspirations (Kirkpatrick, 1973; Kuvlesky and Thomas, 1971). The high level of vocational-social aspiration among