Black Settlement Research Articles

The "Colored American Asiatic Traveler": Peter K. L. Cole and American Empire in Japan

Abstract: This article examines African Americans' participation in US empire-building in the nineteenth-century Pacific World. It uses the life story of Peter K. L. Cole, a Black world traveler and a resident of Yokohama, Japan, to explore how notions of race, empire, modernity, and citizenship circulated around the Pacific Ocean from the 1850s to the 1870s. Cole deployed the intertwined discourses of Black settler colonialism and Black orientalism to stake claims to African American equality in the post-Civil War United States. His efforts to build equal citizenship on the basis of Black men's service to American empire abroad gained little traction as the white supremacist logics of the US settler state excluded Black people from national belonging and erased their participation in imperial expansion.

From Side Street to Ghetto: Understanding the Rising Levels and Changing Spatial Pattern of Segregation, 1900–1940

A standard interpretation of the intensification of segregation in the early twentieth century is that residents of Northern cities reacted against a growing African American presence, using segregation as a tool of social control that was less needed in the South. Evidence from newly available data for 134 cities in 1900–1940 puts this interpretation in question in several ways. We find that segregation was already high in 1900 at the neighborhood scale. Not only was it rising, but it was changing its spatial scale as clusters of Black settlement in side streets and alleys disappeared from White districts while expanding into large Black zones. Finally, multivariate analyses show that trends were similar in the North and South, and in neither region was Black population size (i.e., “Black threat”) a significant predictor of increasing segregation. The general trends of rising segregation and increasing spatial scale became a nationwide pattern.

A Literary History of Josie Craig Berry and Her Communities, 1917–1955

Abstract: Black Americans settled in Oklahoma beginning in the 1830s; the first Black settlers were often people enslaved by Native nations. Despite the long-time Black presence in Oklahoma and the establishment of All-Black towns and thriving middle-class communities in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Ralph Ellison is the only Black writer publishing before 1940 who is commonly associated with the state. Yet Ellison’s science teacher and writing mentor, Josie Craig Berry, was a literary and journalistic powerhouse in Oklahoma City beginning in 1918. Berry published poetry, reported on cultural events, and wrote a weekly literary column for Oklahoma City’s Black Dispatch newspaper from 1937 to 1939. This essay presents Berry as an accomplished poet, a literary critic, a community-based journalist, a public intellectual, and a woman whose contributions to Black literature and Oklahoma literature are immeasurable. Berry’s writings as examined in this essay also make evident the need for further research and academic publications on Black Oklahoma writers.

The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire by Brandon Mills, and: Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization by Robert Murray

Reviewed by: The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire by Brandon Mills, and: Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization by Robert Murray Eve Eure (bio) The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire brandon mills University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020 254 pp. Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization robert murray University Press of Florida, 2021 282 pp. Studies of the American Colonization Society (ACS) remain an important site of critical inquiry into the scholarship on the African colonization movement. Brandon Mills's The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire and Robert Murray's Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization offer new direction in reassessing the role of the ACS in colonization studies. Brandon Mills's book is an important addition to this robust scholarship on the African colonization movement, an effort led by the American Colonization Society to resettle African Americans in the nineteenth century. Mills demonstrates how a reconsideration of the "decades preceding the formation of the American Colonization Society" reveals that colonizationist ideas about African American resettlement were constantly shifting (5). By drawing our attention to this understudied earlier period, Mills seeks to highlight the "competing visions of the United States' settler state" and to suggest that these debates on African colonization expose how they were "both an extension and reinvention of early American empire" (9). Although Mills is interested in the history of the ACS, he is also concerned with tracing the multiple routes of colonizationist ideas as they were fastened to discussions about race, citizenship, and settlement within the Western Hemisphere. Mills draws on an impressive array of historical and literary archives such as colonizationist pamphlets, newspapers like the Cherokee Phoenix and the African Repository, and the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Martin Delany. Mills presents this history of the colonization movement by sketching a chronological narrative of its emergence in the Revolutionary era and [End Page 234] geographic and ideological circulation in the nineteenth century. The first chapter begins with correspondence between James Monroe, the governor of Virginia, and Thomas Jefferson, president in 1801, about "whether the federal government could help his state create a colony of former slaves somewhere within the western territory of North America" (8). He demonstrates how ideas about establishing a Black settlement circulated before the formalization of the ACS in 1816 and that proposals for a Black colony were in response to fears of slave rebellions and ongoing wars with Indigenous nations. Highlighting the numerous pamphlets written between 1796 and 1805 on the subject of a Black colony in the US, Mills explores a variety of colonizationist pamphlets (authored by St. George Tucker, Moses Fisk, John Parrish, William Thornton, and Lewis Dupré) that imagined not only western territories but also Louisiana as a possible place for a Black settlement. By the mid-1810s, however, colonizationists no longer envisioned a Black colony within North America but in Africa. In one particularly fascinating section titled, "Preventing an 'African Tecumseh,'" Mills suggests that colonizationists looked to Africa because they "viewed African Americans' aspirations for sovereignty within North America as a dangerous prospect when paired with the potential collaboration of Indian allies" (28). What emerges in this discussion is an illuminating reading of the interplay between Native resistance movements, Black freedom, African colonization, and US empire. The World Colonization Made emphasizes the language of "failure" to call attention to the significance of the evolution of ideas on African colonization to later proposals on Black settlements in Africa. Such a framework enables Mills to broaden the historical archive on the colonization movement to include failed attempts to establish an African colony in North America and Africa. The World Colonization Made persuasively suggests that what counts as failure in some respects are the unrealized aspirations of the aforementioned authors of pre-ACS pamphlets. In a footnote, Mills observes that historians have often described these pre-ACS documents as "incoherent and unsuccessful precursors to the formidable organization that would coalesce behind African colonization" (203–4). Instead, Mills argues that they should be considered "an incipient movement" (43). He examines Paul Cuffe's efforts to create a Black settlement in Sierra Leone to...

Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843, ed. Misty Krueger

<i>Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843</i>, ed. Misty Krueger

Imperfect Freedom: The Failed Plot to Kidnap John Felix White

Imperfect Freedom: The Failed Plot to Kidnap John Felix White Carol E. Mull (bio) In the fall of 1847, John Felix White labored on a farm in southeast Michigan, some three hundred miles from the place he had been enslaved since age two. A few years earlier, he fled Kentucky with assistance from activists who directed him toward Canada. He found little joy in freedom, however, envisioning his wife and children still suffering in slavery, and decided to resettle in Michigan. With every strike of the hoe and swing of the scythe, he sought to fund his family’s rescue, unaware that the Kentuckian who planned to carry him to the New Orleans slave market had tracked him northward, determined to derail the seemingly impenetrable networks protecting self-emancipators in the Great Lakes region.1 White’s escape, near-kidnapping, rescues, and continued involvement with the Underground Railroad add to our understanding of the transnational antislavery movement in Michigan and beyond. It begins with White’s horrific choice between being sold far from his young wife and children or making a risky permanent escape. He chose the latter. His initial flight from Kentucky started with protection from free Blacks in Indiana and ended in a Black settlement in Canada West (contemporary Ontario). The corroborating accounts of famed abolitionists Rev. Levi Coffin and Laura Smith Haviland describe White’s conveyance northward along an established interracial network from the Ohio River borderlands to the Detroit River borderlands.2 [End Page 67] The attempt in late 1847 to forcibly take White back into bondage reveals the escalation of proslavery activism beyond the border states. Following kidnapping attempts in Marshall, Detroit, and Cass County, slaveholders made another foray to Raisin, Michigan, to capture White. The men who schemed to forcibly kidnap him could rely on associations that funded retrieval of their “Servants.” Proslavery advocates in southern border states created associations to recapture self-emancipators. A stated object of the Kenton County Association was “the security of our Servants, and the recovery of such as may be absconded from their masters or owners.” Politically, they sought a stronger federal fugitive slave law that would curtail free states’ resistance.3 The men who expected to capture and return White must have been mystified to discover farmers in rural Michigan protecting a runaway. The reach of practical abolitionism extended far beyond Michigan’s major cities to small towns and rural properties, such as Watkins Farm.4 Before the Civil War, prominent self-emancipators—such as Josiah Henson and Henry Bibb—wrote autobiographical accounts of their attempts to rescue family from bondage. White’s story, penned by others after Emancipation, specified people by name, providing the means for a full investigation. White was described as an esteemed friend. He gained an education, worked and saved, and maintained friendships with those who aided him in his initial escape. White took charge of his future, rebuffing every suggestion that created distance from his family, and continually prevailed on abolitionists Levi Coffin and Laura Haviland to support his desperate recovery strategies. He twice persuaded Haviland to risk travel into Kentucky, while a bounty for her arrest could have led to a lengthy prison term. White financed, planned, and initiated the liberation of his family on the Ohio River borderlands. He enlisted Black and White friends in careful, clandestine preparations. Of course, he could not plan for the weather.5 [End Page 68] John White and the Transnational Great Lakes Network to Freedom White was born into bondage in Virginia and enslaved in northern Kentucky from the age of two. He was known as Felix during the twenty-five years he described as being “whipped up,” rather than “raised up.”6 Despite severe limitations on his freedom, the young man formed a relationship with Jennie [Jane] Stephens, who lived nearby, and they bore four children by 1845. Jennie was raised on the farm of Benjamin Stephens Jr., her legal possessor and reputed father, in the rural hamlet of Rabbit Hash in Boone County. In 1840, Stephens held nineteen people, including Jennie and her children, enslaved on his property.7 It was the fate of the enslaved to face sudden, horrific changes. The...

Digital Juneteenth: Territorializing the Freedom Colony Diaspora

AbstractAfter Juneteenth, formerly enslaved African Americans in Texas founded hundreds of historic Black settlements known as freedom colonies. Later, freedom colonies’ populations dispersed, physical traces disappeared, and memories of locations vanished as descendants passed away. In the absence of buildings and legally recognized borders, intangible heritage—stories, ephemeral traditions—define a sense of place. Betraying the perception that these places have disappeared, founders’ descendants express commitments to freedom colonies by returning periodically to plan commemorative events, rehabilitate historic structures, and steward cemeteries. The Texas Freedom Colonies Project (The TXFC Project), a team of faculty and student researchers, documents settlements while supporting descendant communities’ historic preservation aims. By making diasporic publics legible and increasing the visibility of communities’ settlement patterns and remaining extant features, The TXFC Project elevates stakeholders’ concerns in urban planning domains. In 2020, COVID-19’s social distancing requirements challenged diasporic descendants’ efforts to foster social cohesion. Consequently, The TXFC Project hosted a Facebook Live “talk show,” leveraging social media platforms to amplify freedom colony descendants’ work. The team analyzed event transcripts revealing cultural adaptations to socially restrictive conditions during Juneteenth commemorations and indicating that virtual storytelling helped territorialize widely dispersed, unbounded places for stakeholders facing natural and human-made disruptions.

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Benjamin Drew and Samuel Gridley Howe on Race Relations in Early Ontario: Mythologizing and Debunking Canada West’s “Moral Superiority”

This essay examines the respective mythologizing and debunking of Canada’s “moral superiority” over the United States on matters of white-Black race relations in Benjamin Drew’s 1856 The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada and Samuel Gridley Howe’s 1864 The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West. Their accounts of the impact of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and American Civil War on Canadian and American political reputations are instructive. The historical presence of Black people in the making of Ontario’s history and its relationship to American antebellum history helps to understand in part from where the superiority myth originates. The impact of the American Civil War on the making of Canada as a political entity has been studied by historians but its cultural force is less studied, particularly in literary studies. The relative absence of such knowledge seems part and parcel of the negative definition of Canada as not-American, indeed anti-American, and has helped to continue the mythology of Canada’s moral superiority over the US on matters of white-Black relations. Drew’s and Howe’s work on the substantial presence of Black settlers in early Ontario has been invaluable for the study of both the diaspora and settlement of Black freedom seekers in Upper Canada/Canada West in the antebellum period. Analysis of the rhetoric of national differences on racism in Drew’s The Refugee (1856) and Howe’s The Refugees (1864), particularly on education and law, counters, as does a wealth of scholarship by Black scholars, the myth of Canada’s racial benevolence.

Black Social Workers Matter: Using Parallel Narratives to Discuss Social Work History

ABSTRACT This article presents parallel narratives as a pedagogical strategy to increase awareness, facilitate critical reflection, and dialog about the role of Black social work pioneers in the development of the social work profession. Using this approach, history is reconstructed and presented in ways that decenter Whiteness and avoid marginalizing people of color. The Black settlement house movement that occurred simultaneous with Jane Addams’s Hull House, the work of Lugenia Burns Hope alongside Mary Richmond, and the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Bertha Reynolds, are parallel narratives discussed. This article intentionally shares the history of the social work profession with multiple narratives, and in addition emphasizes that doing so is a step toward the realization that Black Social Workers Matter.

Contending with the Palimpsest: Reading the Land through Black Women’s Emotional Geographies

Public history depicting Southern landscapes subjugates Black lived experience, foregrounding Anglo settlerism and romanticizing antebellum-era spaces. This article engages a novel and digital humanities platform as counternarrative spaces dismantling dominant narratives informing these landscapes. The Cutting Season (2012) depicts a Black woman engaging folklore, archives, and family history; solving a murder on a plantation; and constructing a counternarrative of the landscape. Similarly, The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas crowdsources stories and archival material to document Black settlements where descendants are displaced-in-place. By recording Black women’s embodied place memories, the site helps Black women resist the deliberate forgetting of endangered settlements and reconstruct emotional geographies. Black women’s counternarratives illuminate their emotional geographies, world building, and rebuilding of communities presumed inert or placeless.

Daily life of the population of black sea coastal settlements amid conditions of Crimean war (1853-1856)

Daily life of the population of black sea coastal settlements amid conditions of Crimean war (1853-1856)

Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843 ed. by Misty Krueger

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843 ed. by Misty Krueger Alison Tracy Hale (bio) Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843 misty krueger, editor Bucknell University Press, 2021 234 pp. Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843 relocates its peripatetic female subjects from the periphery to the center of our vision in order to expand our generic and geographical horizons. The ten essays assembled here traverse the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth and consider genres from natural science to letters to fiction and regions from Peru to Newfoundland to Calcutta. They address a rich variety of primary sources featuring historical and fictional women whose experiences enlarge our sense of the possibilities transatlantic journeys provided for women's identity, for their interpretations of new cultures and interventions into their own, and for the scope of what might constitute a "feminine" sphere. Several decades in, twenty-first-century literary and historical studies continue to shift away from the kinds of nation-state focused approaches that dominated much of twentieth-century scholarship, embracing transnational texts, figures, and methodologies. Krueger's explicit purpose here is to center transatlantic movement by women, to "trace accounts of women's encounters in environments foreign to them and with people seemingly unlike themselves" (16). Atlantic travels provided space and occasion for new modes of acting in the world; European women's out-sider status in the far-flung locations of empire often served as a vantage point from which to challenge established systems and values. Diana Epelbaum's "'Little Atlas': Global Travel and Local Preservation in Maria Sibylla Merian's The Metamorphoses of the Insects of Surinam" considers the German-born entomologist's illustrations, which emphasize the magnificent fecundity of Surinam's local environments. Her folio-sized volume, [End Page 259] which featured her images and descriptions of Surinam's species, expands the parameters of seventeenth-century natural history practice by deconstructing established distinctions between history, science, and narrative. As Epelbaum notes, The Metamorphosis gained Merian a presence in the Royal Society journals, yet her work challenged the epistemological foundations of the practices the Society espoused. Her "proto-ecological" illustrations of Surinam's flora and fauna enact the tensions of globalization; her insistence on local context resists and reinforces the universalizing tendencies of the masculine, colonial taxonomic project in which she participated. Anna Maria Falconbridge's epistolary narrative Two Voyages to Sierra Leone (1794) similarly stretches generic boundaries, offering "an early model for imagining how climate could function as an instrument of state violence, where environments are used to discipline or control unwanted populations" (50). Falconbridge, an apologist for the necessity of slavery, was moved to sympathy by the sight of suffering Black settlers; her narrative indicts the British bureaucracy whose negligence and incompetence intensified their plight. Not all cultural critiques emanated from women of relative privilege; in "Busty Buccaneers and Sapphic Swashbucklers on the High Seas," Ula Lukszo Klein explores the exploits of eighteenth-century female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, whose trial transcripts served as material for their initial appearance in Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724). Assuming male garb, these women navigated the interstices between piracy and legitimacy and masculinity and femininity. Their highseas transgressions, what Klein calls their "outlaw mobility," allowed them new modes of economic and erotic agency. Alongside discussions of literary texts one might expect to encounter in a volume dedicated to women travelers—Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), Unca Eliza Winkfield's The Female American (1767), Samuel Jackson Pratt's Emma Corbett (1780), Leonora Sansay's The Secret History (1808)—additional essays explore eyewitness travel accounts of Peru and Mexico by Frances ("Fanny") Erskine Inglis Calderón de la Barca and Flora Tristan, respectively, as well as epistolary narratives both autobiographical and fictional. The range of primary sources asserts a larger scope for what might count as "feminine discourse," affirming that women of the transatlantic world occupied themselves with concerns that extended well [End Page 260] beyond their own comfort and domestic and familial situations. As naturalists, political critics, pirates, colonizers, and revolutionaries, the women at the center of these essays unsettle masculine empiricist agendas, seek common...

Benjamin Drew and Samuel Gridley Howe on Race Relations in Early Ontario: Mythologizing and Debunking Canada West’s “Moral Superiority”

This essay examines the respective mythologizing and debunking of Canada’s “moral superiority” over the United States on matters of white-Black race relations in Benjamin Drew’s 1856 The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada and Samuel Gridley Howe’s 1864 The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West. Their accounts of the impact of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and American Civil War on Canadian and American political reputations are instructive. The historical presence of Black people in the making of Ontario’s history and its relationship to American ante-bellum history helps to understand in part from where the superiority myth originates. The impact of the American Civil War on the making of Canada as a political entity has been studied by historians but its cultural force is less studied, particularly in literary studies. The relative absence of such knowledge seems part and parcel of the negative definition of Canada as not-American, indeed anti-American, and has helped to continue the mythology of Canada’s moral superiority over the US on matters of white-Black relations. Drew’s and Howe’s work on the substantial presence of Black settlers in early Ontario has been invaluable for the study of both the diaspora and settlement of Black freedom seekers in Upper Canada/Canada West in the antebellum period. Analysis of the rhetoric of national differences on racism in Drew’s The Refugee (1856) and Howe’s The Refugees (1864), particularly on education and law, counters, as does a wealth of scholarship by Black scholars, the myth of Canada’s racial benevolence.

In the shadows of the third Chimurenga?: African migrant intermediaries and beneficiaries within Zimbabwe’s agrarian reform matrix

Zimbabwe’s agrarian reform (‘Third Chimurenga’) narrative continues to cast more insights into the fate of farm workers, many of whom, as descendants of black Africans in the former British and Portuguese central African colonies of what are today Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique, were not seen as ‘Zimbabwean enough’ to benefit from the exercise. While many of these workers were adversely affected, a few, particularly the senior farm supervisors/foremen, showed agency in exploiting the miniscule avenues offered by the reform to position themselves, and eventually access land. Some became intermediaries between the state, the new black settler farmers and former white owners, sowing mutual trust and ambience within a volatile and potentially explosive situation. Using ethnographic data from an A1-designated case study farm (Billdore/Riverside) in the Trelawney/Banket commercial farming area in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland West province, the article suggests that such micro-level positionalities and functions proved critical in the ensuing politics of land appropriation that was predicated on partisan citizenship and belonging rhetoric. Despite their state of unbelonging, some of these previously landless migrant workers have emerged from the shadows of the Third Chimurenga and become their own masters, forging mutual relations and land-labour arrangements amidst the uncertainties of the ever-changing Zimbabwean land tenure system and political environment.

Reimagining Black Freedom – Beyond Place and Time

In this article, the writings of three prolific writers, Canadian Katherine McKittrick, Canadian-Trinidadian Marlene NourbeSe Philips and American Maya Angelou, intersect at the point of Black liberation and form a singular voice where a reimagined freedom can emerge.&#x0D; The piece begins with McKittrick’s research of Black geographies and what Black freedom as a destination looks like, by way of a fixed Underground Railroad journey to settlements like Ontario’s Negro Creek Road. It further interrogates and reverses the power dynamic between the European colonizer and Black settler, by engaging with Philip’s novel, Harriet’s Daughter. Here, teen protagonist, Margaret, changes the rules of her Underground Railroad game, making it possible for anybody to be a slave. Finally, these ideas are connected to Angelou’s autobiographical accounts of racism in the Deep South and her poetic expressions of hope and freedom through her writings, Caged Bird and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom and the African Colonization Movement

Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom and the African Colonization Movement

Обеспечение права на жилище сотрудников полиции на разных исторических этапах развития российского государства

We draw attention to the peculiarities of development of right to housing by police officers since 1718 (the official formation of the police) and indicate how this right was implemented until this year. Thus, until 1718, persons in the civil service, as a rule, consisted of boyars, nobles, etc., and they were provided with housing. The officers performing police functions were elected from black settlements, respectively, they did not have their own housing, so they were given official housing at their place of service. We emphasize that a new stage in the development of police began in 1718, when the post of the St. Petersburg General-Chief of Police was established. However, the relevant normative legal acts regulating the housing provision of employees were not adopted. It is indicated that in the 19th century, compensation was paid to police officers. At the same time, according to the Code of Laws of the Russian Empire in 1857, police officers could conclude a contract of employment, and subsequently, after the publication of the Law of June 23, 1912 “On the Right of Building”, the middle class was protected from taking a large payment from them. for housing. Attention is focused on the fact that after the October Revolution of 1917, in 1922, the Moscow City Council decided to release all employees of the Moscow police from paying utility bills. The right to housing was also ensured after the collapse of the USSR and the reform of the department, taking into account the adoption of the Federal Law of February 7, 2011 No. 3-FL “On the Police”.

Badges and ‘Sticks’: Police Power Dynamics and African Agency in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Natal

In 1860, a case was brought before the court of Pietermaritzburg in the colony of Natal over the illegal possession and sale of guns. What made this case unique was the primary witness against the defendant: an African constable named Budaza. Budaza proudly claimed in his testimony that he had threatened the defendant with his ‘sticks’ during the arrest, despite the constable having misplaced his badge. Though Budaza appears only briefly in the colonial records, his testimony during the trial highlighted his firm belief in his position that transcended the badge he did not possess. Symbols of office like the badge and ‘sticks’ (likely a spear and knobkerrie) were signs of authority within the colonial community, but also representative of an internalised sense of power during this formative period of Natal. When these symbols of leadership and state power were implemented, they revealed a solidified sense of legitimacy granted by the colonial government but also embodied in the attitudes of African policemen. This article will use Budaza’s case to help answer questions of police and colonial power and the notion of indigenous agency in the rural and urban segments of Natal. The interaction between Black police and white settler society will reveal the transitory nature of power in these police institutions and the complicated way these narratives are remembered within the history of KwaZulu-Natal.

Unsettling Human Rights History in Social Work Education: Seeing Intersectionality

Social workers must locate their work within the history of our profession, while also recognizing how and why particular accounts are constructed, legitimized, and disseminated. The historical context of human rights work is especially significant. This narrative has been shaped by selective attention, which advances some perspectives and erases others. Intersectionality encourages scrutiny of missing elements, calling one to explore what else was happening concurrent with the mainstream account and whose perspectives are absent from the story. This paper illustrates the value of an intersectional frame by examining three erasures from human rights history in social work: the Combahee River Collective, the Black settlement house movement, and the Compton’s Cafeteria Disturbance. The paper closes with implications for social work education in four areas: deconstructing contemporary social work narratives, investigating historical and cultural locations of our knowledge base, theoretically contextualizing intersectional contributions, and respecting intellectual contributions beyond refereed journals and other traditional formats. Intersectionality theory engages marginalized aspects of human rights history in educating professional social workers; however, it must avoid cooptation to maintain its vibrant critique.