Black Migrants Research Articles

#ChinaMustexplain: Global Tweets, COVID-19, and Anti-Black Racism in China.

One of the consequences of the emergence of COVID-19 has been the glaring racial and ethnic disparities that have defined the course of the spread of the virus. As a recent migrant-minority community in China, the Black community’s experience has been defined by vulgar racism, exploitation, and stigmatization. In the context of COVID-19, the Black community in China was again a target of multiple racial projects which sought to label their bodies as diseased and physical presence as a threat to the viability and safety of the Han majority. The global response was to mobilize online to expose how the Chinese government is systematically facilitating discriminatory policies against Black migrants in China. In the present paper, we explore how Twitter was utilized to mobilize awareness about anti-Black racism in China. We first present a brief history of African migration to China and then discuss the Han racial ideologies that are inspiring the anti-Black racism. We then use latent Dirichlet allocation as a topic modeling algorithm to extract underlying themes to discuss how anti-Black racism in the COVID-19 context was framed and subsequently challenged by the global community. Finally, we conclude with a brief discussion on COVID-19 and the future of the Black community in China.

Estimating the Effect of School Quality on Mortality in the Presence of Migration: Evidence from the Jim Crow South

How does school quality affect health amid multiple behavioral responses? The Rosenwald schools transformed school quality for rural southern African Americans in the early 1900s. Research shows that the schools made black migration northward more likely and that the Great Migration shortened life expectancy for these migrants. Besides the hypothesized health-enhancing effects of school quality, negative health effects might also occur through migration. We disentangle behavioral mechanisms and find complete exposure to the Rosenwald schools increased life expectancy by 2–3 months; a more naive approach finds no relationship. Results are robust to heterogeneous treatment effects and various measurement issues.

Dreams of a Black Commons on Turtle Island

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.

Review: The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century, by Keneshia N. Grant

Review: <i>The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century</i>, by Keneshia N. Grant

"Times Certainly Have Changed": Burlington, Iowa's Black Community on the Mississippi, 1860–1920

"Times Certainly Have Changed"Burlington, Iowa's Black Community on the Mississippi, 1860–1920 Dwain Coleman (bio) In 1921, Bessie Viola Johnson, a well-known poet, artist, composer, and Black rights activist living in Burlington, Iowa, openly expressed her views on race relations in a special exposé, "Has Race Prejudice Increased?" When the White reporter interviewing Johnson asked about the "chances of colored boys and girls today" living in Burlington, Johnson's reply was straightforward and revealing: "Times certainly have changed. I mean the attitude of Burlington toward negroes and what it used to be." The changes she was referring to were not progressive ones. Instead, Johnson saw the opportunities for Black equality declining in the city in recent years. For example, "it used to be that we colored people could rent a house without difficulty, but that time has long ago passed." Further, Johnson's husband, James, Burlington's first Black podiatrist, had been refused an office-space lease everywhere in town before finally finding a space in the corner of a shoe store. She continued by pointing out the widespread discrimination Black citizens faced in employment, public transportation, and equality in the community.1 Johnson's depiction of race relations in Burlington came at a time when racial animosity and bigotry were increasing in midwestern cities as over six million Black Americans migrated out of the South during the Great Migration.2 Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan flourished outside the South, opening new chapters in midwestern cities like Burlington.3 Bessie Johnson's lament was alluding to such conditions as well as to the idea that race relations in Burlington, while not perfect before, were better in years past. By invoking the past, Johnson indicated that Burlington's Black community was not new nor the result only of the current migration. Born in Burlington in 1875, Johnson was mindful of the long legacy of Black migration to the Midwest and the foundation it laid for later migrations. [End Page 29] Examining Black community building in smaller midwestern cities like Burlington disrupts the popular narrative centered around Black migration to large metropolitan midwestern cities during the Great Migration. Historians and midwestern communities themselves have often overlooked the contributions of late-nineteenth-century Black migrants. Further, the historically marginalized position of people of color in Iowa, and the rest of the Midwest, has often led to a whitewashing of the region's past.4 Historians recently have sought to correct that misrepresentation by providing crucial examinations of the history of Black midwestern migration, community building, and struggles for equality.5 This article adds to this growing historiography by exploring the nuanced circumstances that allowed nineteenth-century Black migrants to create a community within a community in Burlington, a midsized city on the Upper Mississippi River. Understanding the unique circumstances and histories of early Black communities in states like Iowa and other parts of the Midwest provides greater context for understanding the perspective that Black Midwesterners like Johnson developed.6 Such studies also help explain the complicated social, political, and economic environments of the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century midwestern communities in which Black migrants often found racial conditions improved but equality never fully realized. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Bessie V. Johnson with her painting "The Carpenter," in Opportunity: journal of Negro Life 3 (September 1925). As the one-time territorial capital of the Wisconsin Territory and the first capital of the Iowa Territory, Burlington played an essential role in the Upper Midwest's early development. In many ways, Burlington's settlement was typical of other small towns along the Upper Mississippi. Founded in 1834, Burlington became a crucial transportation and manufacturing hub in the nascent Midwest. Black people were present there from the [End Page 30] beginning, helping, like their White neighbors, to build Burlington and the state of Iowa. Burlington's earliest Black inhabitants arrived in the 1830s during the territorial days as both free and enslaved people.7 During and after the Civil War, many more came as refugees and newly emancipated people hoping to create a new life for themselves and their families. These early Black Midwesterners faced hardship in...

Black Migrants and Border Regulation in the Early United States

This article frames the dozens of state-level laws regulating the mobility of free Black people during the antebellum era as part of the history of American immigration law. While historians have shown the importance of antebellum antecedents to postbellum federal immigration law, they have primarily focused on the handful of laws regulating European migrants. But it was free Black migrants, both African American and foreign born, who faced closed or regulated borders from Florida to Oregon. Whether to protect slavery, to eliminate Black labor competition, or simply for racism’s sake, lawmakers across the country and in Congress legislated against Black mobility and criminalized these “illegal immigrants” from the 1780s to the 1860s. Enforcement of the laws may have been uneven, but their effects were profound. In their ideological origins and effects on migrants, border regulations targeting Black people formed an important opening chapter in the history of American immigration law.

Leah Platt Boustan, Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. 216. $29.96 (cloth)

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsLeah Platt Boustan, Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. 216. $29.96 (cloth)David GoldbergDavid GoldbergWayne State University (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 106, Number 1Winter 2021 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/712015 Views: 52Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Invisible Childhoods: Dependent African American Children in the Urban Midwest

Invisible ChildhoodsDependent African American Children in the Urban Midwest John D. Ramsbottom (bio) In 1912, Julia Lathrop, a native of Rockford, Illinois, and a veteran of service at Hull House in Chicago, became the first chief of the Federal Children’s Bureau. In an article published soon afterward, she gave examples of how the new institution would answer “the universal cry of human parenthood.” She recounted her experience at a meeting of “many great foreign societies representing hundreds of thousands of recent immigrants.” One of the delegates, drawn from “a race commonly accounted especially dull and ignorant,” delivered a plea that Lathrop found eloquent in its simplicity: “I am a [father], and like every [father] I want my child to go higher than me.” The man’s words inspired her final reflection: “I think of the long line of immigrant fathers and mothers on American soil since the beginning of the wonderful seventeenth century and I realize that at bottom he spoke the common reason for their coming. The parents who came in the cabin of the ‘Mayflower’ and those who sank in the steerage of the ‘Titanic’ had the same profound impulse.”1 One group of early immigrants was utterly absent from this account. Had the omission of African Americans been drawn to Lathrop’s attention, she would certainly have allowed that Black parents, too, shared the hope of a better future for their children. But in terms of the prevailing story of social betterment in American history, their aspirations were invisible. The purpose of this essay is not to review the evolution of the modern child welfare system, which has been thoroughly described elsewhere.2 Instead, it offers an interpretation of the moment when policy toward Black dependent children emerged in the midst of both urbanization and racial inequality. [End Page 81] Dependence and Migration During the Progressive Era, 1890–1930, migrants flowed into the industrial Midwest from all parts of the U.S. and indeed the world. In particular, the region saw a dramatic increase in African American population during a movement known as the Great Migration. The most striking growth occurred in Chicago, where the Black proportion of the population rose from 2 percent to 6 percent, reaching 250,000 in 1930. In cities like Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Cleveland, the African American population grew more slowly but accounted for a larger proportion of the total. Unfortunately, the Great Migration unfolded against the backdrop of discrimination in public amenities, employment, and housing. In several important urban areas in the Midwest, the rise in Black urban population coincided with an increase of geographical segregation and social isolation.3 In an unfamiliar and often hostile environment, what were the prospects for the growing numbers of children among Black migrants? By the time of World War I, Progressive reforms in care for dependent and neglected children had made substantial inroads in the states of the Midwest; in fact, many had originated there. Above all, a consensus had developed in favor of family placement as a means of caring for dependent children. In mid-western communities of rural, often immigrant background, ‘placing out’ was a common method of dealing with minors whose parents were dead, neglectful, or judged inadequate. This kind of foster care had roots not only in the transport of needy youth from eastern cities on the so-called “orphan trains” but also in the local practice of agricultural apprenticeship and farm labor.4 The Black population of the Midwest, however, was concentrated in urban areas, not the countryside.5 In the exploding cities, both White philanthropists and Black community leaders tried to create a system of institutions to care for African American children at risk. Influenced by a tradition that stretched back to Reconstruction, White reformers sought to instill in Black children the same virtues of self-sufficiency and independence that northern culture demanded of other ethnic groups. But their adherence to the familiar practice of foster placement was ill-suited to achieve these goals. Foster homes for Black youth were in short supply, and orphanages became overcrowded. In times of stress, Black parents preferred to rely upon family and friends to care for their dependents. Black...

Finding a New Midwestern History ed. by Jon K. Lauck, Gleaves Whitney and Joseph Hogan

Reviewed by: Finding a New Midwestern History ed. by Jon K. Lauck, Gleaves Whitney and Joseph Hogan Amy Laurel Fluker Finding a New Midwestern History. Edited by Jon K. Lauck, Gleaves Whitney, and Joseph Hogan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-4962-0182-9. 396 pp., hardcover, $55.00. There is a popular perception that hangs over the Midwest, sometimes over its own inhabitants, that it is the “Lost Region”—a once-vibrant and important place that has now become culturally irrelevant. Finding a New Midwestern History directly challenges this pervasive stereotype by presenting a compelling portrait of a dynamic region. In the process, it calls for the reinvigoration of midwestern studies and appeals to midwesterners, as much as to anyone else, to embrace this unique region. The interconnectedness of identity and place is a central organizing theme that bridges the essays in Finding a New Midwestern History. This edited volume, born of the 2015 meeting of the Midwestern History Association, reflects the scale and diversity of this conference and the field of midwestern studies as a whole. It boasts 21 chapters, each by a different author, organized into six sections. Taken together, the chapters represent an impressive degree of accumulated expertise and offer a broad, interdisciplinary perspective on the study of the Midwest. Employing a variety of methodologies, including physical and human geography, social and cultural history, and literary analysis, the authors establish the Midwest as a region both real and imagined—not only a landscape formed by environmental forces but also a social, cultural, and political construction that became emblematic of American exceptionalism. In one particularly compelling essay, for example, Gleaves Whitney argues the Midwest embodied the [End Page 158] aspirations Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams held for the future of the republic. Each viewed the Midwest as essential to the nation’s unfolding destiny and variously envisioned it as an incubator for liberty, commerce, and virtue. As much as the Midwest evoked a unifying national vision, however, historian Nicole Etcheson persuasively argues for its distinctiveness—even from the neighboring states of the upper South. According to Etcheson, “the Civil War opened a gap between the regions” and that while white Midwesterners harbored racist attitudes, they were far more likely to accept racial equality as an outcome of the war (40–41). Indeed, Michael C. Steiner asserts, the distinctiveness of the Midwest became increasingly evident in the late nineteenth century. Steiner details how the architects of midwestern identity, including historian Frederick Jackson Turner, positioned the region as the literal and figurative heart of the republic and as the wellspring of American virtues like democracy, productivity, and individuality. Finding a New Midwestern History also calls attention, however, to the pitfalls of this mythologized version of midwestern history and identity. In particular, as Susan E. Gray illustrates, it has encouraged the erasure of indigenous midwesterners. Gray suggests this erasure served Turner’s exceptionalist interpretation of American history but insists that it obscures the region’s significant indigenous population as well as its persistent activism. Furthermore, as Jeffrey Helgeson demonstrates, while the appeal of the mythic Midwest as a land of opportunity attracted thousands of black migrants to the region in the early twentieth century, their arrival amplified the deeply entrenched racism of the region. Thus, African Americans experienced the Midwest as “a land of hope and a place of profound disappointment” (112). As the contributions to this volume indicate, such contradictions are endemic to the study of the Midwest. At once rural and urban, agrarian and industrial, imagined and real, the Midwest defies generalization. Its uncertain relationship to the nation, the world, and its constituent parts introduces further ambiguities. As Jon Butler observes: “The real Midwest may not have been the Tower of Babel, but it comes close, with exuberant complications and bitter tensions” (196). Indeed, in this case, the metaphor of Babel is particularly apt. Finding a New Midwestern History raises important questions about voice and authenticity in midwestern studies. Who should tell the stories of the Midwest? Should it be confined to those academics living and working in the region? Is there an authentically midwestern voice? Author Zachary Michael Jack seems to think...

Parish Boundaries at 25: A Personal History

Parish Boundaries at 25:A Personal History 61 John T. McGreevy As a senior in college without a plan, I pondered attending law school, even taking the LSAT. I simultaneously considered graduate school, despite knowing very little about what graduate school entailed. Most of the graduate schools to which I applied rejected my application—I had only the haziest "research agenda"—but I snuck by the Stanford admissions committee. So to Palo Alto I went. I loved the coursework and even the oral examinations, and enjoyed working with superb faculty such as David Kennedy and George Fredrickson, ultimately the first and second readers on my dissertation. But I agonized over choosing a dissertation topic. Despite completing seminar papers on agrarian populism in 1890s California and on draft resisters during the Vietnam war, I doubted whether I could sustain interest in either topic for the long haul.62 I "stopped out" (to use Stanford vocabulary) for a year and taught at Hales Franciscan high school, an overwhelmingly African-American Catholic High School on Chicago's south side. A graduate school friend, Daryl Scott, now a distinguished historian at Howard University and then working on his history of twentieth century ideas about race and social psychology, turned out to have attended the school. We marveled at this coincidence when we would bump into each other while working in the nearby University of Chicago library. 63 By then I had settled on writing about Catholicism. I did so not because I had read about Catholics in graduate school—I hadn't—but because I knew the depth of the milieu. Both of my parents had attended Catholic grade schools, high schools and colleges. (My father also attended a Catholic medical school.) Both had worked in Catholic hospitals for much of their professional lives. The sheer size of the [End Page 29] subculture made its absence from the standard literature on the United States glaring. Historians of, say, imperial Germany, where Catholics were an equally large part of the population, had done much more to make Catholicism a core topic of inquiry.64 But what would be my angle? No subject seemed more exciting to graduate students doing United States history at Stanford in the 1980s than "race" and George Fredrickson's work, and more distantly that of David Roediger, Barbara Fields and others animated late night conversations.65 J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground, on Boston during the busing crisis, amazed me with its narrative force and recounting of the city's Catholic history. I wrote Lukas out of the blue and he encouraged me to examine his notes deposited at the Wisconsin Historical Society. I remember my excitement when I first plucked Arnold Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto off a shelf in a Berkeley bookstore.66 Hirsch mentioned Catholics only episodically. But his brilliant research prompted me to ask: what did it mean that Black migrants to the northern cities encountered so many Euro-American Catholics? I tracked Hirsch's footnotes, which led to a full summer going through the Catholic Interracial Council papers at the Chicago Historical Society. So I had a topic. What I didn't anticipate was that interest in religion in modern United States history would explode in the twenty years after turning in my dissertation.67 As it turned out, and as often happens, I was not alone even in my specific interests. Gerald Gamm's Urban Exodus, on Jews and Catholics in Boston, published three years after Parish [End Page 30] Boundaries, even more convincingly displayed the importance of Catholic institutions in shaping American urban life.68 Thomas Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis, published the same year as Parish Boundaries, became the lodestar for our generation's collective understanding of postwar urban history.69 To my mind it still is. Sugrue only touched on Catholicism—as he acknowledges—but almost against his will it popped up in his analysis at various points. He was the first person, I think, to cite my just about to be published dissertation. Sugrue's scholarly example makes me even more grateful for his commentary in this forum. I especially appreciated his discovery of a real estate listing...

Race, Nation, or Community? Political Strategy and Identity-Making within the Transnational Haitian Diaspora in Miami's "Little Haiti"

This study examines the lived realities of Haitian American community leaders and volunteers residing in the "Little Haiti" community of Miami, Florida, whose experiences as both Black and migrant shape the formation of their communities and political strategies as an ethnic group. Theories of race and ethnicity, transnationalism, and diaspora inform this work and illustrate how Black migrants utilize strategies of political alliances across ethnic and racial categories and in global contexts. Eight in-depth, semistructured interviews with employees and volunteers at a local community center in Little Haiti revealed a diasporic political and cultural consciousness maintained through transnational forms of solidarity. This paper explores how an ethnic community becomes unified as diaspora, and how its members become more socially and globally aware as a consequence of their migrant experience.

W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America ed. by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert

Reviewed by: W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America ed. by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert Christopher McAuley W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Ed. Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert. Hudson, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018. Pp. 144 + 63 illustrations. $29.95 (cloth). "Black America in Technicolor" is what may come to mind as one studies the vividly colored and creatively designed maps, bar graphs, pie charts, and other shapes that W. E. B. Du Bois and his collaborators used to represent Black America at the Exposition Universelle in Paris at the opening of the twentieth century, now assembled and published for the first time by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert in W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. So accustomed are we to viewing social scientific data in black and white that we can forget that the originals, in some cases, were vibrantly rendered in the full spectrum of colors. But as the editors and contributors—Aldon Morris, Mabel O. Wilson, and Silas Munro—make clear in their short but effective contextual essays and commentaries, the choice of hues was only one part of the Du Bois team's strategy of data representation. No less important to its members were the configuration and layout of the numerical and statistical information, fully cognizant of the fact that to challenge hardened perceptions, like racial ones, the researcher must appeal to the senses as much to the intellect. Hence, their use of a variety of geometric shapes, angles, planes, symbols, lettering, and fonts in their "infographics." The results are exceedingly striking visual representations of data that one has to literally see to appreciate, especially those that Du Bois's team constructed to convey Black migrations and measures of social progress in literacy, landownership, and school enrollment. Our contemporary visual renderings of data look drab and flatly unimaginative in comparison. A firm believer in the independent power of empirical data Du Bois may well have been, but he also understood, like any Parisian boutiquier, that there is power in presentation. [End Page 196] The volume contains reproductions of all sixty-three "data visualizations" that were part of the American Negro Exhibit, and are divided into the categories that Du Bois's "design team" chose: The Georgia Negro: A Social Study and A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now in Residence in the United States of America. Accompanying each plate are informative and suggestive remarks by Munro, describing how the Du Bois team's visual innovations anticipate later artistic movements. As the editors and contributors note, the aim of the Du Bois team was to present Black America at the state, national, and international levels, so as to move exhibit attendees to locate Black America in global history and processes, including their particular experience of racial enslavement. Also included in the volume is a reproduction of a photo of the exhibit area of the American Negro Exhibit, which shows the framed and mounted infographics along the back and side walls, as well as those in double-sided wing frames. The photo also reveals the other "eclectic set of objects, images, and texts" that Du Bois's team assembled in the exhibit area, including framed photographic portraits of prominent African American leaders and politicians; tools, harnesses, and other agricultural products from black industrial schools; a bronze statuette of Frederick Douglass; and an on-site collection of over two hundred and fifty publications authored by African Americans and compiled by Daniel Alexander Payne Murray. (9) The photo, along with the editors' inventory of the archive that the Du Bois team used to represent Black America, allow the reader to imagine how white European and North American passers-by, on-lookers, and the curious received that information and what they later related to others about it. We have no way of knowing if the committee that awarded Du Bois a gold medal for coordinating the American Negro Exhibit at the Exposition Universelle did so because its members were genuinely convinced of the central points of the exhibit's designers: that Black American...

An Ever-Present Impulse: The Legacy of Anti-Black Violence and the Paradox of Minnesota Exceptionalism

An Ever-Present ImpulseThe Legacy of Anti-Black Violence and the Paradox of Minnesota Exceptionalism William D. Green (bio) With the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, the Band-Aid of conventional wisdom applied to a state long noted for its enlightened relations between Blacks and Whites, was ripped off to reveal to many a shocking truth. Belying a racially tranquil setting within the idyllic Land of Ten Thousand Lakes—where such iconic leaders as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett received a cordial welcome from public leaders—the specter of violence loomed large against Blacks. This subterranean propensity, an ever-present impulse, an ever-threatening potential—enabled by White Minnesotans' complaisance—comprises what University of Minnesota economist Samuel L. Myers calls the "Minnesota Paradox." Its enablers, including progressive political leaders and their constituents, deferred to mobs—but more frequently to city police departments—to do the dirty work of abusing and endangering Black people. They looked the other way until collective memory faded and the public record gathered dust in some long-obscured footnote.1 During the year preceding the Civil War, police officers and mob members each took extralegal steps in determining the fates of fugitive slaves. One example was the 1860 rendition of Henry Sparks by St. Paul police; they beat him before summarily placing him on a steamboat heading south. Weeks later, Minneapolis Whites rioted after a Hennepin County judge freed Eliza Winston. They completely destroyed the property of Emily Grey, the Black businesswoman who initiated the hearing that led to Winston's liberation. They also demolished Grey's husband's barber shop.2 In 1863, St. Paul police allowed White laborers on strike in the city to stone two [End Page 59] barges transporting contraband slaves from Missouri. The laborers believed the contrabands had been brought to the capital to break their strike. Petitions had circulated for weeks opposing the use of contraband labor and calling on the legislature to enact yet another law prohibiting Black migration into the state. When draft registration began that summer, officials—fearful that draft riots raging in New York and other eastern cities might spread to the already volatile St. Paul—considered posting a provost guard.3 The police department could not be relied upon to confront the fury of White laborers who were convinced that the Black men now residing in St. Paul stood poised to take their jobs and women—while Whites were fighting and dying in the distant South to free all men. The Minnesota Paradox remained evident during the years after Appomattox, as civil rights progress cloaked dangerous inequalities. Minnesota Republicans, after two failed attempts, succeeded in amending the state constitution to extend suffrage to the state's Black men. The following March, they ended school segregation.4 By then, Congress had nationally ratified the 13th and 14th Amendments, and many White Minnesotans who could be counted on to be anti-Black could see the trend toward racial equality. Indeed, some of their own government leaders seemed willing to concede that a new day dawned for Black equality, when, weeks after the new school law passed, court officials in the Democratic stronghold of Ramsey County—who had scorned Black suffrage—now swiftly seated Black men on a jury.5 In January 1870, Minnesota voted to ratify the 15th Amendment.6 It made Black men politically equal to the White laborers who felt abandoned by their own Democratic leaders. But those Whites were not without allies. The police—many of whom came from the laborers' socio-economic ranks—could be counted on to enthusiastically brandish their own form of law and order. That the police would not intervene when Whites threatened Blacks was clear in February 1873 when Frederick Douglass came to St. Paul to speak on the advancement of the "negro" since the Civil War. As he addressed a packed hall of Republican civic, political, and business leaders, a crowd formed outside hurling catcalls and threatening to lynch the speaker. The better-heeled crowd inside responded by shouting louder their support for Douglass's message. The tone of antagonism...

John Akomfrah’s Nine Muses: A Reading with Glissant’s “Relation” and Quantum Entanglement

John Akomfrah's film The Nine Muses (2010, United Kingdom) deals with the theme of the journey across the great works of literature. In particular the film sets the works of the Western canon, from Homer's epic Odyssey to Joyce's Malloy, within the visual frame of archival footage dealing with the Windrush Generation, that is, Caribbean Black migration to England following World War II. In counterpoint to that set of visuals Akomfrah has created a futurist set of scenes set in Alaska, and the frozen northlands, to which the concept of exile from the tropical settings of the Caribbean or Africa might seem most extreme. This article will provide an analysis of the journey and exile motifs utilizing the framing of Glissant's notion of Relation, primarily, and secondarily the quantum concept of entanglement.

Residential Segregation at the Dawn of the Great Migration: Evidence from the 1910 and 1920 Census

AbstractThe second decade of the twentieth century is viewed as the pivotal period for ghetto formation in the United States. This decade witnessed the onset of the Great Migration and it was during this time that modern ghettos, massive agglomerations of tens of thousands of Blacks and virtually only Blacks, became visible. Despite the importance of this period for ghetto formation and the subsequent segregation experienced by Blacks, our understanding of the dynamics of segregation during this period is incomplete. We utilize recently released fine-grained census data to present a more precise and complete picture of segregation in American cities in the second decade of the twentieth century and in doing so make several contributions to the historical literature on residential segregation. First, we document how segregation varied across the full range of American cities, including Southern and smaller cities overlooked in most historical accounts. Second, we assess how the influx of Southern Black migrants into Northern cities was related to increasing segregation. Third, we ascertain the role of Blacks’ socioeconomic status in determining proximity to Whites. Fourth, we examine racial zoning’s impact on segregation. Finally, we consider how the presence of immigrants in a city was related to the residential segregation experienced by Blacks. This research thus adds to the literature on residential segregation by providing more reliable estimates of the degree of residential segregation experienced by Blacks at the beginning of the Great Migration as well as exploring other factors associated with varying levels of segregation at that time.

The Great Migration in Myth and Reality

The founders of professional sociology in the United States constructed a system of racial segregation that paralleled the Jim Crow system in the American South. Recent research has analyzed both the structure and dynamics of this systemic racism, as well as the resourceful resistance to this discrimination by African-American scholars housed in historically Black universities and colleges (HBCUs). This essay extends that work by discussing the ways in which the Jim Crow structure was enacted and sustained over many decades, how this exclusionary project limited and distorted the research, analysis, and theory developed within the white universities; and how the work of Black sociologists – ignored and dismissed by the white establishment – constitutes a precious heritage of important and still valuable scholarship. This contrast between sterile white establishment scholarship and the still-valuable work of HSBCs scholars is documented by comparing the white and Black scholarship on the first decades of the Great Migration. This comparison demonstrates that even iconic texts by white establishment scholars presented an already disconfirmed portrait of the migration process and dynamics of Black migration from the U.S. rural South to Northern cities; and that distorted portrait of immigration was perpetuated through decades of subsequent establishment scholarship. In contrast the work of Black scholars provided indelible on-the-ground evidence that disproved the theories articulated and perpetuated by their white contemporaries, while documenting a broad theoretical perspective that remains valuable in understanding contemporary migration issues.

‘African gangs’ in Australia: Perceptions of race and crime in urban neighbourhoods

In 2016, Melbourne experienced what was referred to in the media as the Moomba ‘riot’. This event led to a racialised political and media campaign regarding the problem of ‘African gangs’. Despite no evidence of actual gang activity, the backlash against black migrants in Melbourne was consequential with increases in reported racism and institutionalised forms of discrimination. In this study, we examine the neighbourhood context of exclusion against African Australians following the Moomba ‘riot’. Using census and crime data integrated with survey data from 2400 residents living in 150 urban neighbourhoods, we interrogate the relationship between sentiments (measured as anger) towards Africans and perceptions of neighbourhood crime and disorder. We further consider whether quality contact with Africans and neighbourhood cohesion mediates this relationship. We conclude with reflections on the significant and deleterious effects of the ‘black and criminal’ association on understandings of ‘Africanness’ in Australia.

Munene Franjo Mwaniki, The Black Migrant Athlete: Media, Race, and the Diaspora in Sports. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Pp. 270. $50.00 (cloth).

Munene Franjo Mwaniki, The Black Migrant Athlete: Media, Race, and the Diaspora in Sports. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Pp. 270. $50.00 (cloth).

Rediscovering Dana: The Forgotten Black Coal Miners of Southern Wyoming

Abstract When coal was king in late nineteenth century Wyoming, the industry was dominated by the Union Pacific Coal Company (UPCC). Operating dozens of mines throughout the high deserts of southwestern and south-central Wyoming well into the twentieth century, the UPCC’s economic success was thanks in large part to its practice of creating wage competition among its carefully recruited pool of multinational and multiethnic laborers. Unsurprisingly, the company’s first recruited group of Black miners were brought in as strikebreakers. They came to a short-lived coal town called Dana about 150 miles west of Cheyenne. Instead of playing the company's intended role, the Black miners greatly influenced early labor reform efforts and the trend of Black western migration and settlement. This article contributes to the scholarship on Black laborers in the West by examining the story of Dana’s Black miners, their role in the passage of fair labor legislation, and their subsequent removal from the historical record. By both building on recent methodologies and utilizing tools of historical interpretation often dismissed or minimized outside the practice of public history, such as genealogy, this article also argues that restoring individual identity augments perception of overall migrant group experience and significance in the evolution of the social and industrial landscape of the U.S. West.

Black migrants in Brazilian and South African tabloids: Representations on the Global South

This work investigates how Afro-migrants are represented within a Brazilian and a South African tabloid in terms of race and ethnicity. It also employs scorpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to analyse verbal language. Results suggest that the two newspapers represent black migrants in the light of criminality, either as victims or perpetrators. They often place migrants as beneficiaries of charity, especially in the Brazilian case, and more as perpetrators in the South African case. Passivization of migrants is noticeable in both tabloids; however, the Brazilian outlet resorts mostly to reported speech and editing of the migrants’ voices while the South African offers them either freer speech or silencing. Ultimately, Afro-Latin philosophical principles such as self-determination and empathetic zeal are often times neglected across many depictions.