Local Black Communities Research Articles

Reclaiming narratives of empowerment around Black maternal health: a strengths-based, community-informed focus group study

ABSTRACT Objectives Research on Black maternal populations often focuses on deficits that can reinforce biases against Black individuals and communities. The research landscape must shift towards a strengths-based approach focused on the protective assets of Black individuals and communities to counteract bias. This study engaged the local Black community using a strengths-based approach to discuss the assets of Black maternal populations and to inform the design of a future clinical trial focused on reducing Black maternal health disparities. Design Guided by the Theory of Maternal Adaptive Capacity, we conducted three purposive focus group sessions with Black adult community members. The focus groups were semi-structured to cover specific topics, including the strengths of the local community, strengths specific to pregnant community members, how the strengths of community members can support pregnant individuals, and how the strengths of pregnant community members can facilitate a healthy pregnancy. The focus group interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using thematic content analysis. Results Three focus group sessions were conducted with sixteen female individuals identifying as Black or African American. Central themes include (1) the power of pregnancy and motherhood in Black women, (2) challenging negative perceptions and media representation of Black mothers, (3) recognizing history and reclaiming cultural traditions surrounding birth, and (4) community as the foundation of Black motherhood. Conclusion Black community members identified powerful themes on Black maternal health through a strengths-based lens. These focus groups fostered relationships with the Black community, elucidated possible solutions to improve Black women’s health and wellness, and offered direction on our research design and intervention.

Geospatial Analysis of the Proportion of Persons Defined as Underrepresented in Medicine for Each Medical School and Their Surrounding Core-Based Statistical Area.

The current approach to increasing diversity in medical education fails to consider local community demographics when determining medical school matriculation. We propose that medical schools better reflect their surrounding community, both because racially/ethnically concordant physicians have been shown to provide better care and to repair the historical and current racist impacts of these institutions that have criminalized, displaced, and excluded local Black and Brown communities. In this study, we used geospatial analysis to determine that medical school enrollments generally fail to reflect their surrounding community, represented as their core-based statistical area, within which the individual medical schools reside.

Reclaiming Linnentown: a critical place-based approach to decolonize social studies curriculum

PurposeThis article aims to examine the manifestation of coloniality within social studies curricula and explore strategies for rejecting colonial paradigms through teaching praxis. The author presents a curriculum that unveils the narratives of Linnentown, a local Black community, to examine the impacts of colonial legacies on people's everyday lives.Design/methodology/approachUsing the teaching and learning cycle framework, the author demonstrates the integration of sequenced embodied and multimodal activities. Furthermore, the author utilizes the concept of critical place-based education (CPBE) to demonstrate how critical pedagogies within the context of place can cultivate transformative learning experiences.FindingsBy guiding students to critically analyze the sociopolitical conditions of Linnentown residents, CPBE, paired with multimodal activities, helps challenge dominant narratives and empowers students to become agents of change in their local communities.Originality/valueThis curriculum fosters a nuanced understanding of structural oppression, empowers students to develop critical awareness and social agency and guides youth in confronting settler colonialism within and beyond their communities.

Engagement with a local African-Caribbean community to explore perspectives and research priorities among Black men for prostate cancer using a co-participatory approach.

Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most common cancer in the UK, with 1 in 8 affected in their lifetime. However, there are significant race disparities that Black men are more negatively impacted than any other races with their increased risks and worse outcomes. However, they are under-represented in research, and often labelled as 'hard to reach' population. The aim of this study was to reach out to a local Black male community using a co-participatory approach, to build up trust and explore their understandings and concerns of the disease. We recruited 2 community researchers (CRs) from SACMHA (Sheffield African-Caribbean Mental Health Association). Using a co-participatory approach, we worked together throughout the project, including recruitment, planning and facilitating workshops, analysing and presenting data. Two workshops were organised. We introduced an overview of PCa followed by open discussion in several small groups. A rapid qualitative analysis was used to identify key points. The engagement was fantastic. We recruited over 30 participants from the Black male community for the first workshop within 4 weeks. A range of topics were raised which were summarised as a Black men's journey of PCa. The participants were very keen to receive information and have their voice heard. These are facilitating factors in engagement. The males showed concern about their lack of awareness of their high risks of PCa. Personal experiences have also been emphasised throughout the disease journey. Using a co-participatory approach in community research engagement was successful. We shared our knowledge, built trust, and identified research priorities.

“On a Risky Slope of Democracy”: Racialized Logics Embedded in Community–School Board Interactions

As school board meetings are integral sites of local education policymaking, scholars must consider how structural racism manifests in these spaces across various district contexts. We examine how racialized institutional logics undergird the interactions between majority-Black district leadership and a local Black community during school board meetings. Through an ethnographic case study of school board meetings over the 2019–2020 school year, we find that racialized pressures led predominantly Black school board members and district administrators to uphold policies and practices that limited two-way authentic interactions with their Black constituents. In conclusion, we argue that racial representation in educational politics may be important, but is not sufficient unless accompanied by changes to policies and practices that privilege Whiteness and reproduce racism.

Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus

Reviewed by: Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus Erin Krutko Devlin (bio) Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town. By Jill Ogline Titus. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 264. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $27.95.) As Jill Ogline Titus reminds readers in Gettysburg 1963, newspaper coverage of the Civil War centennial was distributed alongside stories about the burgeoning Black freedom struggle and debates about Cold War politics and policies. Gettysburg 1963 strives to help readers understand how these threads of American cultural and political life converged on the Gettysburg battlefield, illuminating a contested landscape in which commemorative rhetoric was shaped by a desire to forge a memory of 1863 that could be mobilized in service of a wide range of social and political aims one hundred years later. Titus notes that formal commemorative bodies, such as the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission, often sought to mobilize a reconciliation-ist vision of the war that emphasized military valor, technological progress, and reunification, which served the broader purpose of reanimating American patriotism and encouraging heritage tourism in the midst of the Cold War. Yet Titus also notes that this narrative was never unchallenged in the commemorative activity surrounding the centennial. She illustrates how an emancipatory memory of the war as a “new birth of freedom” sought to frame the conflict through the lens of racial justice during the civil rights movement, while Lost Cause rhetoric was mobilized to recast resistance to desegregation as the preservation of states’ rights. As Titus demonstrates, both of these alternative strands of memory also sought to tether their memorial claims to the politics of the Cold War, with those promoting an emancipationist vision arguing that the failure to address racial injustice undercut the nation’s position as a beacon of democracy, and those promoting the Lost Cause narrative contending that opposition to civil rights legislation served as a bulwark against government overreach and totalitarianism. Titus argues that these divergent and diverse approaches to memorializing Gettysburg meant that commemorative activities at the battlefield in 1963 “were employed simultaneously to champion racial equality, legitimize midcentury anti-government sentiments and activities, and strengthen the U.S. position internationally” (5). Gettysburg 1963 is focused on official commemorative activity— speeches, pageants, exhibits, and battlefield reenactments—but Titus evocatively notes that participants and visitors exposed to these divergent [End Page 274] interpretations of the war were not passive spectators. “Participants,” she writes, “did not simply absorb the commemoration’s messaging wholesale, but rather made decisions about where and how to participate (and what ideas to embrace) that ensured a variety of different takeaways about the connections between 1863 and 1963” (84). Indeed, Titus concludes that the divergent commemorative narratives presented during the centennial substantially disrupted the reconciliationist rhetoric promoted by the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission and Gettysburg National Military Park in 1963, with both emancipationist and Lost Cause narratives rising in prominence in the years that followed. Titus explores public reception of these competing strands of memory most directly in her discussion of audience attendance at or reaction to various pageants, roundtables, and public addresses. She is particularly attentive to local participation in commemorative activities on the battlefield’s national stage. Indeed, Gettysburg 1963 examines how national debate about the meaning and memory of the Civil War battle played out locally in the community of Gettysburg itself and nearby Gettysburg College, where Titus currently serves as associate director of the Civil War Institute. Titus notes that local residents had a particular stake in the way the centennial was positioned in relation to heritage tourism and were invested in debates about the appropriate balance between commercialization and battlefield preservation as they sought to harness the economic potential of the centennial. Titus also demonstrates how the borough struggled with its own history of racial segregation and discrimination. The international attention focused on Gettysburg in 1963 provided the local Black community with the leverage needed to push white business owners toward the meaningful desegregation of public accommodations. Gettysburg 1963 will resonate most powerfully for...

Cy McLean and the Trailblazers of Black Jazz in Prewar Central and Eastern Canada

Cy McLean and the Trailblazers of Black Jazz in Prewar Central and Eastern Canada Wade Pfaff (bio) THE STUDY OF JAZZ IN CANADA'S BLACK COMMUNITIES must begin with the fascinating stories of the lives of the first generation of big band leaders in the 1920s and 1930s, who overcame grave personal and professional obstacles due to their skin color in a turbulent time. Although these African Canadian musicians struggled to make lives for themselves as professionals, the fast-paced changes taking place in the music industry after the Second World War and the Canadian media's lack of attention combined to make them invisible to all but a few historians. This research note examines the career and family history of Cyril (Cy) McLean and compares his accomplishments with those of two other important band leaders who gained large audiences in Canada during the interwar period (1918-1939)–Ollie Wagner and Myron (Mynie) Sutton–in order to discuss the fact that there were racialized barriers in Canadian entertainment. Each of these men left their homes in small Black communities across the country and went on to create some of the first all-Black Canadian swing bands in Canada. The "Great Migration" of southern American Black people to the industrial urban cities of the northern United States during the first half of the 20th century occurred in an east-west fashion in Canada, with Black Canadians gravitating towards the centre of the country for community, opportunity, and a more equitable business climate. This research note also draws attention to the ways in which African diaspric music has helped shape Black Canadians' resilience and political will, which in turn has helped unite Canada's diverse African diasporic population. Each of the three musicians mentioned above–Cy McLean, Ollie Wagner, and Mynie Sutton–were important influencers in the fledgling jazz industry of Canada, but when the public's taste changed in later years all three men returned to physical labour jobs to support their families. These trailblazers of Central and Eastern Black Canadian jazz, sadly, are almost completely forgotten today, except by Canadian music historians. Their life stories are inspirational studies of perseverance, dedication to art, and the maintenance [End Page 121] of personal dignity in a society that was full of admiration for Black people's artistry yet lacked empathy for their lack of civil rights or poor quality of life. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Cy McLean, Toronto Star, 24 June 1969 (photographer Doug Griffin). Source: Toronto Star Photograph Archive, Object Number TSPA_0067429F. During the Great Depression in Canada, there were no federal laws dictating racial segregation. But right up to the end of the Second World War, local customs and regional business practices ensured that there were very [End Page 122] few premier performance venues in Central and Eastern Canada that allowed Black Canadian artists much less Black customers. The best jobs were always reserved for union members only, and Black people were not welcome in most Canadian union locals until Cy McLean and his band broke through these racial barriers in 1944. Prior to that landmark year, Black Canadian musicians had to play under an American union card or perhaps under the Coloured Clef Club of Montreal union card (an all-Black organization). Big stars from the United States, such as Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, could play in the top venues, but they had to enter from the rear and arrange for dwellings themselves with the local Black community because reputable hotels in Central and Eastern Canada did not allow Black patrons. Cy McLean and the Rhythm Rompers were very active in Toronto during the Second World War, but by the 1960s, as swing music continued to lose popularity, McLean ended up playing his brand of "sweet" jazz in some of the less-desirable venues around Toronto with just one or two accompanists while maintaining a second job to support his family. Cy McLean's story is representative of many unknown artists' struggles, which were (and are) not unique in Black Canada even today. Cy McLean's family came to Canada as part of a modest migration from the West Indies that started in...

"Is This Mic On?" Improving NICU Quality of Care by Amplifying Black Mothers' Voices.

"Is This Mic On?" Improving NICU Quality of Care by Amplifying Black Mothers' Voices.

‘We want our own data!’: building Black community accountability in the collection of health data using a Black emancipatory action research approach

Community accountability is a model through which to redress anti-Black racism in health care and to create community-based participatory research about the health of Black Canadians. This article provides a case example of a study undertaken by a Black community collective in Quebec made up of researchers, activists, service providers, business leaders and their allies who sought community accountability in making visible the impact of COVID-19 on local Black communities. The principles articulated within the Black emancipatory action research approach (Akom, 2011) are used to ground an analysis of our research-activist process in order to illuminate how knowledge gained through the collection of data can be used to help inform Black communities about the realities, needs and concerns of their members, to advocate for rights and entitlements, and to work towards community accountability in research that empowers Black communities, both in Quebec and elsewhere.

Access to Labor and Leisure in Cars: Early Black Motorists’ Automotivity in Miami

Automobiles significantly changed access to leisure for Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century, spawning interest in and growth of resort towns like Miami, Florida. The occupation of chauffeur was a frequent site of both class conflict and anti-Black terror. Yet the car operated as a liminal site of subjectivity in which Black chauffeurs determined some parameters of their experience of both work and pleasure. Black chauffeurs in Miami in the 1910s were at the vanguard of efforts by local Black communities to create and claim pleasurable space and its attendant leisure via driving in a profoundly racist and exceptionally dangerous touristic climate. At stake was access to a commodity and a profession with an exhilarating potential to upend social, political and economic norms, remolding communities in ways that promised leisure for local Black motorists, chauffeurs, and vacationers. Black automotivity in Miami disrupted aspects of the city’s system of racial capitalism and established the car as a potent site of refusal, work, and pleasure.

Finding a New Illinois History: Connecting with the Revival of Midwestern Regional History

Finding a New Illinois History: Connecting with the Revival of Midwestern Regional History

Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era by Allison E. Schottenstein

Reviewed by: Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era by Allison E. Schottenstein Timothy Riggio Quevillon Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era. By Allison E. Schottenstein. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2021. Pp. 432. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) While much has been written on the state of Black and Jewish relations in the twentieth century, particularly in the South, Houston has long been a curious omission from scholarship. This has also been true of Houston’s place in general scholarship on African American history. Despite the city’s large Black population and historical position as one of the South’s largest cities, few works on African American history, whether they address civil rights, urban life, or Black migration, have put much focus on it. This has changed in the 2010s, as scholars such as Michael Botson, Bernadette Pruitt, and Tyina Steptoe have increasingly engaged Houston’s history within a larger southern history. Allison Schottenstein’s first book, Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston During the Civil Rights Era, fits perfectly into this growing interest in Houston and southeast Texas. Changing Perspectives focuses primarily on Jewish activists in Houston and their responses to the inequities faced by the local Black community. Schottenstein contends that, in the face of civil rights struggles, Houston’s Jews largely “adopted a philosophy that was both liberal and focused on acculturation” (12). In practice, this meant finding ways to ensure the rights of Black Houstonians without sacrificing their acceptance among White non-Jews. While Houston’s Jews created a public perception that they accepted segregation laws, Schottenstein discusses how this was not always how community relations played out in private. Focusing on eight distinct periods in Houston’s Jewish history, including communist scares, desegregation, Jewish neighborhood migration, and religion in schools, Schottenstein examines how the relationship between Houston’s Black and Jewish communities grew throughout the course of the postwar decades. [End Page 329] Perhaps the strongest part of Changing Perspectives is its chapter dedicated to the coinciding fights against segregation of and religion in the schools. Schottenstein’s is the first major work to draw a connection between desegregation and the secularization of public schools, despite both movements having targeted White, conservative school boards in the South. For Houston’s Jews, Schottenstein argues, the fight over school prayer highlighted that “their identity as white Americans of Jewish faith did not provide them with complete acceptance in the Gentile world” (197). In realizing this, and seeing the roots of White discrimination against Blacks and Jews as interrelated, Houston’s Jews embraced the causes of Black Houstonians with greater publicity. The failures of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect religion compelled Houston’s Jewish leadership to champion the cause of full school equality more aggressively. Overall, Allison Schottenstein’s book is a welcome addition to the historiography of Jewish civil rights activism. She builds upon the work of Clive Webb and Mark Bauman in arguing that the relationship between southern Jews and Black Americans was more nuanced than arguments of Jewish inaction would suggest. Changing Perspectives also adds to the historiography on interracial political coalitions within Texas by highlighting the interconnectedness of Black and Jewish political issues in postwar Houston. The biggest strength of Changing Perspectives is its accessibility. Schottenstein strives to use history to be inclusive and a tool to build bridges, making it accessible to a broad spectrum of our society. Both academic and lay readers alike will find use in this book as it balances original and insightful research with an accessible and compelling narrative. Schottenstein’s abundant use of oral histories highlights the unique stories of Jewish shop owners, tradesmen, and school board members who quietly became staunch allies for racial change and equality in Texas. Ultimately, these stories will be what grips lay readers while offering scholars important details on Houston’s desegregation campaign that, until now, remained unexamined. Timothy Riggio Quevillon University of Houston Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Pharmacy-led COVID-19 vaccination site in a mosque is beating vaccine hesitancy, says contractor

A pharmacy-led vaccination site in a Birmingham mosque “is working” in its campaign against vaccine hesitancy among the local black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) community, the site’s lead pharmacist has said. Pharmacists working with the Masters Group chain of pharmacies began administering vaccines from two sites — a community pharmacy site and the Al-Abbas […]

Abstract PO-022: Exploring knowledge and perceptions of cancer care and clinical trials in the local Black community to develop culturally-tailored interventions

Abstract Introduction: In Forsyth County, North Carolina, 52% of Black residents live in three zip codes—27101, 27105, and 27107—that comprise East/South East Winston- Salem. Cancer incidence and mortality are significantly higher in Forsyth County when compared with the US average (11.2% and 30.7%, respectively). Given the harmful history of systemic anti-Black racism in the region, including forced segregation and eugenics, we sought to hear directly from stakeholders to better understand the knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences around cancer care and clinical trials (CTs) amongst Black residents in our catchment area. Methods: We collaborated with a Black-owned research group to implement a qualitative study using racially-concordant facilitators. Key informant interviews (n=14) were held with stakeholders, including health care providers (n=4), patients (n=24), caregivers (n=8), and patient advocates (n=13) in the local Black community; results informed the development of a focus group protocol. Four focus groups were conducted with black residents in Forsyth County including groups of cancer survivors and family members (n=46 participants total). Transcripts were coded using NVivo12 Plus and a code-based report was thematically generated and analyzed by community and academic stakeholders. Results: While many participants endorsed past participation in a CT, little knowledge about the structure and purpose of CTs was evident. None of the participants, including providers, could express that cancer patients enrolled in CTs would never only receive a placebo; cancer patients would always at least be given the standard of care (SOC), or when patients progress through SOC, would possibly be provided with a new therapeutic drug. Participants described cancer CTs as “riskier” because of the seriousness of the disease being treated. They also did not associate non-interventional trials focused on changing health behaviors or patient- reported outcomes with CTs. Barriers to CT participation included mistrust and fear of experimentation; facilitators of participation included personal benefit or benefit to others, monetary incentives, and personalized communication and treatment strategies. Conclusion: Limited patient, caregiver, and stakeholder knowledge about CTs suggested the need for an intervention to address this gap. A population health navigator (PHN) program was created to provide culturally concordant navigation to traditionally underserved patients (Hispanic, Black, rural). The role of the PHN includes educating patients on the importance of CTs and standardizes CT education to help normalize the role of research in cancer care. Based on results of this qualitative study, the PHN program is being adapted to provide culturally tailored education to increase overall CT awareness, knowledge, participation, and adherence among Black patients. Citation Format: Kelsey Shore, Carla Strom, Kathryn Weaver, Derek Falk, Karen Winkfield. Exploring knowledge and perceptions of cancer care and clinical trials in the local Black community to develop culturally-tailored interventions [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Virtual Conference: Thirteenth AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2020 Oct 2-4. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2020;29(12 Suppl):Abstract nr PO-022.

Abstract PO-044: A pilot concept for cancer education outreach to community K-8 schools

Abstract Introduction: The authors examined feasible mechanisms for a cancer research lab at a university to improve racial/cultural cancer disparities issues in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. The goal was to find tangible mechanisms to preliminarily and proactively attend to racial disparities issues based on recent events in our community. Materials and Methods: The authors identified four domains of activity that could potentially be deployed to the local Black community. These consisted of improved community education, improved health care access, improved researcher education about racism/cultural bias, and education on the concept of trauma informed care. Community cancer education outreach was judged most feasible program’s researchers. In the past, education outreach had been performed at K-8 school science fairs and a community cancer education program where we have been instructors (an entity called Mini-medical school). Demographics for past interactions were analyzed to gauge directing further outreach. Results: In the Twin cities proper 16-19% of the residents are Black (Primarily African American and Somali); in the larger metropolitan area 8-9%, and 6-7% overall in Minnesota. We found that our research program outreach had occurred at a school with only 4.4% Black/African American students. At the larger Cancer education program (Mini medical school), approximately 3.5% of attendees were African American. Both of these outreach activities occurred in communities with much lower percentage than the 16-19% Black community demographic (P<0.001). Discussion: We plan to contact primary schools in local communities of color where we can participate at science or technology fairs as educators/judges based on our scientific expertise. Further, through these local schools and their communities, Cancer disparities education (such as the mini-medical school) could be tailored to neighborhood school communities as part of this outreach. The authors felt participation in this activity by Black physicians/scientists/students, inexpensive access, and maximizing student/family availability for the program would be necessary to optimize the experience. We conclude that such a grass root pilot would provide useful education for the community, perhaps improve cancer research interests in primary grade students, and could feasibly be extended to additional cancer research labs at our university, based on the results of a 1-2 school pilot effort. Citation Format: Juliana M. Ondrey, Frank Ondrey. A pilot concept for cancer education outreach to community K-8 schools [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Virtual Conference: Thirteenth AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2020 Oct 2-4. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2020;29(12 Suppl):Abstract nr PO-044.

“In these streets”: the saliency of place in an alternative black mental health resource centre

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore experiences of survivors of the mental health system regularly attending a mental health resource centre predominantly but not exclusively focussed on needs of the BAME community. Design/methodology/approach In total, 25 participants took part in a qualitative research study regarding their experiences of mental health and racism, alternative mental health support and struggles in the local black community. Findings Issues of race, place and space were central to the experiences of BAME mental health survivors. Participants emphasised the importance of place-based support in their everyday life, with the service provided engendering a sense of belonging conducive to coping with various struggles. Race and racism were also central to these daily struggles and the place of Liverpool 8 was at the core of notions of identity and belonging. The space within the centre provided a sanctuary from the combined discriminations and exclusions attendant on being BAME survivors of the mental health system. Practical implications Attention to matters of place and space appears crucial to the articulation of appropriate support. Social implications Place is salient to understanding the intersecting identities/experience of racism and mental health discrimination, constituting the basis for a concept of placism; associated with exclusions from feeling safe and included in everyday public places (including within the black community) with the exception of the welcoming and unconditionally accepting space of the centre. Originality/value This paper is the first to inquire into place-based experiences of alternative black mental health support. Placism is a novel construct that merits further inquiry and theoretical development.

Roil Britannia! Al Sharpton, the British Press, and the 1991 Murder of Rolan Adams

ABSTRACT Drawing on archival material from the Black Cultural Archives, the British Library, and the Institute of Race Relations, this article sheds fresh light on a largely overlooked 1991 visit to Britain by controversial Black American preacher Al Sharpton following the racist murder of Black teenager Rolan Adams. The extraordinary response to Sharpton’s arrival by the British mainstream press revealed racist patterns of news reporting and a chauvinistic rejection of ‘outside agitators’, while the minister’s intervention drew a mixed response from local activists. However, the furore sparked by Sharpton’s visit also helped to raise public awareness of Adams’ murder and galvanise local Black communities, providing an important insight into anti-racist organising and British media coverage of high-profile racist incidents prior to the death of Stephen Lawrence.

Localisation barriers to trade: The case of South Africa’s renewable energy independent power program

ABSTRACTSouth Africa’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Projects Procurement Program (REIPPPP) has been hailed as one of the most successful programmes of its kind, contracting 92 renewable energy projects totalling 6 328 MW and US$20.5 billion since its inception in 2011. Despite this success, the programme’s use of non-price factors such as local jobs, local black ownership, local content, and local community ownership in bid evaluation has generated criticism and controversy. Lessons learned in other countries about how and when to use policies like import substitution to promote sustainable economic development seem not to have been fully incorporated by the REIPPPP. We therefore offer a cautionary note that dramatic and impressive localisation results are not inevitable – especially considering the size of the South African market and accompanying investment uncertainties – and that there is bound to be a trade-off between price and non-price factors in these kinds of competitive procurement programmes.

The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation by Benjamin Fagin

Reviewed by: The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation by Benjamin Fagan Joseph Rezek (bio) The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation benjamin Fagan Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016 186 pp. Benjamin Fagan has written a thorough account of five black newspapers from the early and mid-nineteenth century, devoting one chapter to each: Freedom's Journal (1827–29), the first African American newspaper, founded by Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm; Colored American (1837–41), founded by Phillip Bell; North Star (1847–51), founded and edited by Frederick Douglass; Provincial Freeman (1853–57), the Canadian paper founded by Mary Ann Shadd Cary; and Weekly Anglo-African (1859–65), founded by Thomas Hamilton. Each chapter traces the origins of a newspaper from within the social and intellectual world of its founders and editors and highlights a common theme: the idea of "black chosenness," drawn from a millennial view of history, that "black Americans would lead the world to universal emancipation" (3). Each newspaper, Fagan argues, sought to define and redefine how to promote freedom for African Americans as an oppressed nation destined for liberation. There was little consensus about this, and Fagan deftly weaves in and out of various ideological clashes, from the assimilationist position of Freedom's Journal to editors who rejected the United States and affirmed diasporic affiliations, to the vehement Anglophilia of Provincial Freeman, to the Weekly Anglo-African's embrace of enlisting in the Union army after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Fagan argues strongly that we cannot divorce the study of print from the life stories of those who surrounded the press: including writers and readers, as well as printers, editors, illustrators, correspondents, and agents for distribution. He thus links together the newspapers under consideration not only by their medium (as large-format, serially published, widely distributed, and politically engaged papers) but also by the rich social fabric of black activist and religious communities in the northern United States and Canada—many of which were connected to each other across time and geographical distance. Like Jacqueline Bacon in her groundbreaking study of Freedom's Journal (2007), Fagan shows that we need to understand the emergence of early black newspapers as a function of the beliefs, aspirations, and political strategies of the individuals who brought them into [End Page 285] existence. In making this argument Fagan aligns himself with scholars of early African American print culture who take a social and biographical approach, as opposed to others—coming from the field of book history—who find that print's media specificity destabilizes traditional notions of authorship and racial identity. "Human relationships," Fagan writes, "knit the newspapers in this study together, and make this book as much about people as it is about print" (19). It is a methodology well suited to his goal of understanding the fraught and inspiring visions of racial solidarity and freedom black editors explored in the antebellum period. Fagan begins in his first chapter by chronicling the "middle class" aspirations and ideologies of Freedom's Journal, which advocated "black propriety" as a strategy to convince whites that African Americans were deserving of freedom (23). While advertising a readership that stretched from Boston to England to Haiti to the southern United States, Cornish and Russwurm tried to discipline the sometimes unruly behavior of their black compatriots, convinced that conventional morals, education, respectability, piety, and righteousness were central to the priority of "acting chosen," as Fagan puts it (32). This agenda "emerged out of the contests and concerns of local black communities" (23) and was tested as black New Yorkers paraded in the street to celebrate the passage of New York's gradual emancipation law in 1827. Whites in the North had been ridiculing and violently opposing black celebratory parades since they began with the abolition of the slave trade in 1808, and elite writers like Cornish and Russwurm wanted to discontinue them—an unpopular stance that "shattered [the] illusion" that Freedom's Journal could "speak for black Americans across the country" (38). Fagan demonstrates both the limits of the paper's politics and its importance as a trailblazing publication. Fagan begins chapter 2 by noting that before Phillip A. Bell founded...

Beyond Schoolmarms and Madams: Montana Women’s Stories ed. by Martha Kohl

Reviewed by: Beyond Schoolmarms and Madams: Montana Women’s Stories ed. by Martha Kohl Victoria Lamont Beyond Schoolmarms and Madams: Montana Women’s Stories. Edited by Martha Kohl. Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2016. xi + 319 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $19.95 paper. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the passage of Montana women’s suffrage, the Montana State Historical society published the blog Women’s History Matters over the course of 2014, a series of short essays that collectively convey the diversity of Montana women’s history in all its surprising and delightful messiness. Beyond Schoolmarms and Madams: Montana Women’s Stories is an anthology of these essays. Readers looking for broad narratives of Montana women’s history should look elsewhere; this collection deliberately resists master narratives through its emphasis on specificity and diversity, signaled in the first two essays, which feature, respectively, Indigenous women warriors and ethnic women’s groups. Indigenous Montana women figure prominently in the collection as activists, witnesses to forced removal from tribal land, practitioners of Indigenous art forms, and professionals in white-dominated occupations such as nursing and journalism. Despite the racism they faced as residents of small-town Montana, black women like healthcare worker Rose Gordon and pioneer Mary Fields not only survived but left lasting marks on their communities. Black women in Montana also worked collectively to advocate black civil rights and support their local black communities. Women on the extreme margins of Montana society, like Chinese immigrant Mrs. Wo Hop, are harder to recover. We know Mrs. Who Hop only from the legal papers she had to carry with her at all times to prove she was in the country legally. Such documents are powerful reminders of just how much of women’s experience is lost to history because their lives were not deemed worthy of remark save by the authorities who sought to control their movements. Records of the Montana Territorial Prison speak cryptically of prostitutes, domestic abuse victims, women with disabilities, and others whose existence would have gone unnoticed by historians were it not for their encounters with the prison system. There are, of course, essays that address more familiar sites of western women’s history: the involvement of predominantly white middle-class women in pursuits such as health care, education, social work, temperance, and midwifery and their presence in traditionally [End Page 243] masculine spaces like rodeos, ranches, and popular novels. Serving as counterpoints to these traditional historical subjects are eclectic figures like new age mystic Elizabeth Clare Prophet, bootlegger Josephine Doody, and poultry specialist Harriette Cushman. Not all the women treated in the volume are the celebrated kind. Essays on women’s involvement in the KKK and eugenics movement are sobering correctives to the celebrity model of women’s history. The essays are all well documented and accessibly written, making this both an interesting read for the nonspecialist and a reliable teaching and reference resource for scholars. Some readers may find the organization frustrating—it jumps around thematically and chronologically in ways that may obscure larger historical patterns. As an attempt to unsettle the “Schoolmarm and Madam” stereotype of western women’s history, though, the collection works admirably. Victoria Lamont Department of English University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln